Why don’t software development methodologies work?

A short comment but the one I was looking for in this thread. People often forget the "People over Process" part of agile which implies no Methodology is going to be the answer. All you can hope for is to create the correct process (methodology) for the people you have at the time.

Trying to fit the people to the process is why software methodologies fail.

I've never been on a team that didn't have some manner of unnecessary ritual put on them by the management or client. I agree with your comment, and I would additionally add that a good team can go with the flow and work well within the context of most silly rituals.

From my personal experience, the article nails it

"It’s common now for me to get involved in a project that seems to have no adult supervision". But my bigger problem is that the youth of today seem to have a much bigger ego than the youth of yesterday.

"Once a programming team has adopted a methodology it’s almost inevitable that a few members of the team, or maybe just one bully, will demand strict adherence and turn it into a religion". Recently working with an off shore team, they called their tech lead literally "God". And he was pontificating procedures and styles left and right without understanding the core of the software first. He stopped when the product start to have big performances problems. One of the ones that I liked the most was his prohibition to use class indexers in C#, backed up by an example in Java.

I agree mostly with the article. The most important thing about any team is its people and their individual & team dynamic. 2nd is motivation to make the project a success.

3rd or possibly lower is the methodology used. The methodology's main purpose in my opinion is to align everyone's working style to milestones, it doesnt reveal anything about whether the project will succeed, only how we will approach it.

Because it tries to fix human problems logically. Humans are not very logically creatures. We love to think we are, but most of us are very emotionally driven. Our emotion comes into play when it comes to drive, motivation, hard work, creativity, and organization. Creating software requires motivation, creativity, organization, etc. Our emotion is behind software and we simply try to manage it with software development methodologies, but that's not enough.

How many people are over weight, who know that all you have to do is eat less, work out and then you will get in shape? It's that simple. Yet because of emotions, eating due to emotion, happy eating, sad eating, or poor self image many people don't get in shape. Likewise many students understand that all you have to do to get great grades is to avoid procrastinating, just start studying on time, study hard, study more, do most of the exercises in your text book, use multiple books and you are most likely to pass with high grades, yet lots of students put it off, poor will power, delayed gratification, it's more fun to goof off.

Same things apply to software, a lot of us know exactly what it takes to make good software, to spec it out, to plan a good architecture, to write good test units, to comment and document the code, to organize the process, to avoid over optimization, to avoid changing and adding lots of new features in the middle.

Yet, a lot of us don't do that, we start writing code before we even code before we spec out, because its exciting! Our emotions in play, we don't practice that delayed gratification of holding off and writing specs. We plan to throw away this prototype, but then somehow, it ends up being what everything is built on. We plan to refactor one day, but feature creep never allows for that. We know we ought to comment, but we understand the code now and don't, then 6 months later we are cussing and kicking the wall. Test units are boring, so we write as little of it as possible.

Until we take into account that programmers are humans, with emotions and different level of discipline, motivations and abilities our software development methodologies will keep to fail us for most projects.

Just my opinion.