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Agile Is a Glass Cannon

tomdalling.com

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Re: Agile Is a Glass Cannon

#11

Post by ljf »

pflenker wrote: post #6
ljf wrote: post #3

Good article. I think the issue is the often 'higher ups' want 'Agile' as they've heard it is faster and/or cheaper - missing the part that it is faster and cheaper to fail with agile. If you know exactly what you want and are happy to wait, then an agile methodology probably isn't for you. If you need to test something out or scratch an itch now , then agile might be a good fit (depending on the skills/buy in/experi…

The comparison to home building is not a good one - houses are things which are repeated, with customizations and slight modifications, and people are deeply familiar with houses. The closest analogy in the software world would be simple websites such as blog or easy shops, where e.g. a WordPress plus some customizations would be enough. Software is completely different though. Building chatgpt is vastly different fr…

Exactly - as I say: If you know exactly what you want and are happy to wait, then an agile methodology probably isn't for you.

I think you missed my point, (sorry if it wasn't clear). An agile way of working can be right if you want to test and learn and you need to unlock value quickly (or more quickly than building a whole).

But the industry I work in, even 'agile' projects come with 6 month planning 'sprint zero', and then basically just use sprints to work through a waterfall plan. Getting no value from 'agile'.

Re: Agile Is a Glass Cannon

#13

Post by jayd16 »

Kinda misses the entire point of 'agile' which is a way to adjust to and gather changing requirements in an iterative process. It's a risk _mitigation_ strategy.

I'm not sure I agree that anything is a glass cannon because it could work but you could also do it wrong so it could fail. If a team can't pull off agile what do they think would have been a safer strategy?

Re: Agile Is a Glass Cannon

#14

Post by emilsedgh »

mpweiher wrote: post #8

> success largely depends on the skill and experience of the individuals involved. Yes. Well sort of. The key insight here is that in software at least, this is a pre-requisite anyhow. If you don't have skilled and/or experienced people, nothing will save you. So you might as well tailor your process around the expectation of a certain amount of skill, because although you can't use process to save you, you can use p…

Young individual without enough skill/experience joins a team and fails miserably. Same individual joins another team and succeeds.

Skills and/or experience are _not_ prerequisite for every single individual. You need enough skillful/experienced people to create a process/culture that allows less experienced engineers to join and flourish.

Re: Agile Is a Glass Cannon

#15

Post by ljf »

goodluckchuck wrote: post #9
ljf wrote: post #3

Good article. I think the issue is the often 'higher ups' want 'Agile' as they've heard it is faster and/or cheaper - missing the part that it is faster and cheaper to fail with agile. If you know exactly what you want and are happy to wait, then an agile methodology probably isn't for you. If you need to test something out or scratch an itch now , then agile might be a good fit (depending on the skills/buy in/experi…

> I like to point out that very few house builders use agile methodologies to build a home. Home construction often has milestones that are fairly comparable: 1) competition of the structural components, 2) drying in, 3) utilities, 3) drywall and Paint, and 4) Finishing. Each of these are phases where they could theoretically stop. There are times in history and places in the present where people live in structures t…

True - and yes you 'could' move in to a building that has just the structural components completed, but the value for the home owner is rarely released at that point.

Re: Agile Is a Glass Cannon

#16

Post by jayd16 »

carlmr wrote: post #7
jen729w wrote: post #4

Anyone else notice Agile creeping in where it has no place being? I’m suffering on an infrastructure transformation project — migrating complex apps to Azure — which insists on being Agile. It’s preposterous. I just started and already I’ve counted up 40 person-hours of time in ‘planning’ sessions. I spent two hours in a room with an architect and a whiteboard and then one single day myself on Thursday building a sch…

>I just started and already I’ve counted up 40 person-hours of time in ‘planning’ sessions. I mean this is what always bothered me about every implementation of "agile" I've seen. Agility has a definition, planning everything in minute detail is not in any way reconcilable with that definition. Scrum is the worst at this. If you want to convince me of agile it has to be harmonious with the word definition. E.g. creat…

"Planning" meetings are also about alignment and information sharing. It's probably not about asserting dominance.

Re: Agile Is a Glass Cannon

#17

Post by drewcoo »

Fair enough.

Agile was a response to heavy process. And systems where people's jobs were all about adding more process to the already heavy process. Process hell.

In the couple of decades since little "a" agile really got adoption:

1. many people have not seen v-model or spiral model and their attendant process wonks

2. agile was turned into Agile and became a way to micromanage, first micromanagement with no rules, then later, more and more "Agile rules"

So now we have SAFe, which is sort of the worst of both worlds: micromanagement plus a smothering blanket of process.

But back to the point . . . the intention was never to create the ultimate system that was totally amazing but only when staffed with complete experts who were also psychically connected. The intention was to ditch process hell.

Re: Agile Is a Glass Cannon

#18

Post by onethought »

keyraycheck wrote: post #10

I have a question to non-agile people? How do you work and get things done?

What do you mean by the question? Non-agile people? You mean people that don’t do scrum? Or do you want someone to step forward and say: “I’m really rigid and refuse to change direction once I start, this is how I get things done…”

If you mean no scrum, simple, no card wall, tasks are epics, trust people to know what to do and let them do it. Help people when needed.

Re: Agile Is a Glass Cannon

#19

Post by jdlshore »

jen729w wrote: post #4

Anyone else notice Agile creeping in where it has no place being? I’m suffering on an infrastructure transformation project — migrating complex apps to Azure — which insists on being Agile. It’s preposterous. I just started and already I’ve counted up 40 person-hours of time in ‘planning’ sessions. I spent two hours in a room with an architect and a whiteboard and then one single day myself on Thursday building a sch…

> Anyone else notice Agile creeping in where it has no place being?

Eh, not really. Agile is barely practiced by any companies.

What most practice is a gawdawful abomination of micromanagement and iterative waterfall that they have the audacity to call it “Agile.”

Agile is clearly defined in the Agile Manifesto. (Don’t forget the principles on a second page.) All you have to do is treat it like a checklist and you’ll see it’s barely practiced anywhere. (“Individuals and Interactions over Processes and Tools? No. Customer Collaboration over Contract Negotiation? No.” Etc.)

Maybe I’m getting jaded.

Re: Agile Is a Glass Cannon

#20

Post by mongol »

I think it is crazy we are debating Agile more than 20 years after it was coined. After such long time, a successful idea should not need constant debate about its advantages and disadvantages. We should be on the next thing now, post-Agile, whatever that would be.
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