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Agile Is Dead (Long Live Agility)

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Re: Agile Is Dead (Long Live Agility)

#91

Post by lucisferre »

collyw wrote: post #82
lucisferre wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with Scrum is it is rarely about principles and more about a process. Not that there is anything intrinsically wrong with that, but generally speaking, there are no one size fits all processes that will work for (or "fix") every business and team out there. If it's really working for you and your team, that's great though. But there really isn't anything magic about Scrum. It's not the silver bullet many…

>The problem with Scrum is it is rarely about principles and more about a process. I was thinking this recently about agile. Lots of "agile" followers seem to advocate a lot of process SCRUM, or "always do TDD". Does the Agile manifesto not say: "Individuals and interactions over processes and tools". Basically these people are doing the opposite.

I wholly agree. Which is what I find so confusing about Agile "methodologies" and their ardent supporters. I'm not knocking the methodology (well I probably am) rather that they have little, if anything, to do with agile in the original sense.

Re: Agile Is Dead (Long Live Agility)

#92

Post by bokonist »

beat wrote: post #79
michaelochurch wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And I'm not saying this in the "just let us hack" mindset either, because I pretty much despise that sloppy, careless mentality. It doesn't work in environments larger than a few people, much less genuinely large projects. There's a surprising low upper limit on the size of a closed-source codebase before which it becomes a lead weight. Why? Because large projects (beyond about 6 devs in 2 years) without modularity g…

That's why software organizations need to be modularized, just like code, so the small teams can work efficiently. But on the other hand, doing that just pushes complexity around. Instead of having a team chaos problem, you have an API and requirements chaos problem.

But on the other hand, doing that just pushes complexity around.

This. In my experience moving to small teams, service-oriented architecture, and semi-open allocation, the underlying problems of coordination were not solved. We had all sorts of issues coordinating API work and being blocked because one team's API was not performing up to par, but they were not fixing it because they had competing priorities. What ultimately helped get us moving again was getting a new engineering lead who had very good overall product judgement and could bang heads to get people on the same track.

If your app is intrinsically decoupled, then obviously small teams and SOA is a good idea. But if your app is inherently interconnected and requires coordination among complex pieces, then you are really choosing your poison either way.

Ultimately, I think the only proven solution for building high quality, complex software systems is to have Steve Jobs or another extremely talented and charismatic BDFL.

Re: Agile Is Dead (Long Live Agility)

#93

Post by McUsr »

willvarfar wrote: post #37

Here's my favourite post about Agile: http://pindancing.blogspot.com.au/2009/09/let-agile-fad-flow... Very worth reading entirely.

I liked most of the generalizations in the blog post,I think that if he isn't 100% right, then at least he is really on to something.

The place I balked, is where he said that design patterns are almost dead. I find design pattersn to be invaluable, and so does at Apple Computer and with them millions of developers, so the death of design patterns is a bit premature.

Re: Agile Is Dead (Long Live Agility)

#94

Post by lucisferre »

projectileboy wrote: post #69
lucisferre wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From what I can see none of his own books are actually about "Agile". In fact "Agile development with Rails" is probably the only one that used that word in the title, and I can't really fault him for taking advantage. Also he wrote some quite good books, 'Pragmatic Thinking and Learning' come to mind. I don't think your comment is particularly fair, nor does it diminish the point he is making in any way even if you'…

His words: "Once the Manifesto became popular, the word agile became a magnet for anyone with points to espouse, hours to bill, or products to sell. It became a marketing term, co-opted to improve sales in the same way that words such as eco and natural are. A word that is abused in this way becomes useless—it stops having meaning as it transitions into a brand." From his company's website: http://pragprog.com/catego…

No not really. None of those are books he wrote himself. He runs a book publishing company. It's primary purpose is to publish books people want to buy. Though I'll agree that many of those authors capitalize on the exact things he is railing against in his post.

Re: Agile Is Dead (Long Live Agility)

#95

Post by bad_user »

bananas wrote: post #7

I found that no methodology works as well as getting the right people in and let them organise themselves. If you have the wrong people, it doesn't matter what methodology or process you bring in, you're screwed. On that basis, methodology isn't that relevant. I just watched a company apply SCRUM to apparently solve process problems and it just made things worse because the staff aren't disciplined or interested in w…

"Development methodologies" are all about Process, as in the process to yield good results with ordinary people. For a team with good people that can self organize, processes stay in the way.

My general rule of thumb for considering somebody good (or great) is his/her ability to recognize / to be upset about problems / to care about usability or correctness of the implemented business logic ... and to roll up their sleeves and simply fix it, even without confirmation. If you have such people on the team, then the team can self-organize, if not, then prepare for sprints and meetings.

Re: Agile Is Dead (Long Live Agility)

#96

Post by steveklabnik »

planetjones wrote: post #13

Well said. A friend of mine is another company are supposedly moving to "Agile". Their approach is to have whole day meetings to discuss how it will work! Three months later they're still planning how their Agile, Scrum based thing will work. The conferences, the consultancies, the big companies, etc. really have destroyed the essence of the Agile manifesto in many ways.

I once worked at a company that was in their third year of transitioning to Agile.

Re: Agile Is Dead (Long Live Agility)

#97

Post by Domenic_S »

shadowmint wrote: post #38
bananas wrote: post #7

I found that no methodology works as well as getting the right people in and let them organise themselves. If you have the wrong people, it doesn't matter what methodology or process you bring in, you're screwed. On that basis, methodology isn't that relevant. I just watched a company apply SCRUM to apparently solve process problems and it just made things worse because the staff aren't disciplined or interested in w…

The point of that article is that you need to be self reflective and open to change. I'll post it here again, without any of the other distracting things he said about verbs and so on. Just take a moment to think about what these steps actually mean: - Find out where you are - Take a small step towards your goal - Adjust your understanding based on what you learned - Repeat If you want to work as effectively as you c…

Assuming you know what your goal is.

Re: Agile Is Dead (Long Live Agility)

#98

Post by allochthon »

bananas wrote: post #7

I found that no methodology works as well as getting the right people in and let them organise themselves. If you have the wrong people, it doesn't matter what methodology or process you bring in, you're screwed. On that basis, methodology isn't that relevant. I just watched a company apply SCRUM to apparently solve process problems and it just made things worse because the staff aren't disciplined or interested in w…

> If you have the wrong people, it doesn't matter what methodology or process you bring in, you're screwed.

Agile puts the focus on developers, but often the wrong people are management.

Re: Agile Is Dead (Long Live Agility)

#100

Post by [deleted] »

beat wrote: post #75

Meanwhile, I'm watching helplessly from the sidelines as "DevOps" becomes the next "Agile", tasting bile in my mouth and wondering when a brilliant concept for reworking the culture-clash problem between developers and operations got reduced to a "knows how to use Chef/Puppet" for recruiters.

[deleted]
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