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Why do some developers consider Agile development to be nonsense?

agileoverflow.com

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Re: Why do some developers consider Agile development to be nonsense?

#11

Post by someengineer »

One thing about Agile that I don't see mentioned much is that it provides a way for bad managers to marginalize the effects of low performers among their groups, though at the expense of high performers.

Every company has "cowboy" programmers who break shit and ruin their coworkers' lives with massive 1am check-ins, and a lot Agile seems designed specifically to put up road blocks to prevent this from happening. Managers love it because it provides an escape from dealing with problem employees directly. Most of the vehemently anti-Agile people I've worked with were grossly overconfident in their abilities and difficult to work with, which I think supports this idea.

Unfortunately, the only way for this non-management technique to be effective is to do it dogmatically with no deviations (otherwise the cowboys will always have some excuse for why it shouldn't apply to them), and this is where things start pissing off the actual talent.

Re: Why do some developers consider Agile development to be nonsense?

#12

Post by outsidetheparty »

This matches my experience.

We recently brought on a couple of PM consultants who are deep into Agile as a methodology, and decided to give it a go -- it's been about six months now and productivity has basically ground to a halt as we spend more and more meeting time endlessly sorting tasks into different little arbitrary piles instead of actually making forward progress. It's made communication with the non-software part of the company much more difficult, because they keep getting hung up on the jargon; we have to slice up tasks arbitrarily to get them to fit into "sprints," which go out of date minutes after the morning standup when the first non-planned bug report lands. Sizing is frequently an exercise in post-facto book-cooking: 'How long will that bug take to fix?' is like asking 'How long is it going to take to answer 23 across in next Sunday's crossword puzzle?' It might be fifteen seconds, it might take all day; until I have a chance to look at the puzzle I'm just pulling numbers out of my ass. The short timeframes encourage everyone to twiddle around the edges of things instead of doing real feature development; the arbitrary milestones serve mostly to make everyone feel like they're constantly falling behind.

I've discussed this with a bunch of people. Everyone seems to agree that we're doing Agile wrong, but even the strongest proponents of the methodology seem to be in complete disagreement on what the "right" way to do it is, or how that would be an improvement over the way we were doing things before.

So yeah. Not a fan.

Re: Why do some developers consider Agile development to be nonsense?

#13

Post by father_of_two »

couchand wrote: post #8

This article cements in my mind the issue: devs tend to take away from agile what they expect to find, rather than taking the time to understand the motivations and whole scope of activities. Historically, most software development methodologies are excessively top-down, so people somehow still expect that from agile. Most devs are the sort that couldn't stand doing group projects in school, so the idea of organizing…

"permanent PIP" -- didn't got this part, can you explain?

  that couldn't stand doing group projects in school
Hm, how did you found that about me? :-)

Re: Why do some developers consider Agile development to be nonsense?

#14

Post by throwaway1979 »

outsidetheparty wrote: post #12

This matches my experience. We recently brought on a couple of PM consultants who are deep into Agile as a methodology, and decided to give it a go -- it's been about six months now and productivity has basically ground to a halt as we spend more and more meeting time endlessly sorting tasks into different little arbitrary piles instead of actually making forward progress. It's made communication with the non-softwar…

"Productivity ground to a halt for six months"

My experience feels the same way. I am beginning to think Agile works for UI dev and small teams of inexperienced folks building relatively simple projects. If you have a large team building something complex, the constant meetings and tool updates destroy productivity. What's worse ... they destroy developer morale if you are actually a good dev IMHO.

Re: Why do some developers consider Agile development to be nonsense?

#15

Post by fennecfoxen »

dccoolgai wrote: post #9

The term has been hijacked. It is useless. There is merit in the idea that it once encapsulated, but it has long since been co-opted to mean something almost completely the opposite of its original intention.

Yeah, this nonsense isn't a problem of agile. It's a problem of people who don't know what they're doing, on both sides of the equation.

Which isn't to say that it's not a problem for agile -- it definitely is. I'd say that it's analogous to Gresham's law: when people can't tell the difference (until it's too late) bad "agile" drives out the good.

Re: Why do some developers consider Agile development to be nonsense?

#16

Post by couchand »

father_of_two wrote: post #13
couchand wrote: post #8

This article cements in my mind the issue: devs tend to take away from agile what they expect to find, rather than taking the time to understand the motivations and whole scope of activities. Historically, most software development methodologies are excessively top-down, so people somehow still expect that from agile. Most devs are the sort that couldn't stand doing group projects in school, so the idea of organizing…

"permanent PIP" -- didn't got this part, can you explain? that couldn't stand doing group projects in school Hm, how did you found that about me? :-)

I'm assuming the author meant Performance Improvement Plan, which is business-speak for "we're going to fire you in a month."

Re: Why do some developers consider Agile development to be nonsense?

#17

Post by bitwize »

Agile is like CrossFit: the techniques are sound, but the techniques really aren't the point. The point is to create a revolution by wrapping sound techniques in an us-vs.-the-world ideology that has strong emotional appeal. This makes it easier to sell trainership certifications, which are where the money is.

Re: Why do some developers consider Agile development to be nonsense?

#18

Post by Serow225 »

zimpenfish wrote: post #10
UK-AL wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not meant to be for that. It's meant to be let people know whats going on, because someone might know something that would save you time. I.e Collaboration.

I've been in a lot of standups and that's never come up. (Yes, I know, the plural of anecdote is not data.)

OT, but I'm stealing that quote! Made my morning :)

Re: Why do some developers consider Agile development to be nonsense?

#19

Post by kabdib »

dccoolgai wrote: post #9

The term has been hijacked. It is useless. There is merit in the idea that it once encapsulated, but it has long since been co-opted to mean something almost completely the opposite of its original intention.

Yeah. Scrum doesn't make management disappear, it amplifies it.

I saw meetings with middle managers (people who hadn't shipped anything significant in a decade) in daily meetings, going over burn-down rates of individual engineers and "expressing concern" through channels that someone was off their schedule by a couple of days. The daily scrums were just half-hour status-in-a-ring and some public shaming if you couldn't say that you did anything, so a lot of people made stuff up, or at least hedged by saying they'd completed 50% of the work or that tests were "nearly passing" (code for: my stuff is broked).

Oh, and in the mean time the build system we devs were using had been on fire and broken for three weeks and it was nearly impossible to get a working build. WTF?

I said, "We don't need Agile. We need an earthquake to collapse that wing of the building" (where the managers were; they liked to cluster).

We had Ken. Ken was there at the beginning for maybe a week, and for the next few weeks after that it was great. But we forgot that middle managers are still gonna manage, and that you have to fire them or they're still going to be there, you know, managing stuff, because that's all they know how to do.

And with the right tools, Scrum can be turned into the perfect surveillance state. (I stole that from another response in this thread, thanks).

Re: Why do some developers consider Agile development to be nonsense?

#20

Post by calibraxis »

couchand wrote: post #8

This article cements in my mind the issue: devs tend to take away from agile what they expect to find, rather than taking the time to understand the motivations and whole scope of activities. Historically, most software development methodologies are excessively top-down, so people somehow still expect that from agile. Most devs are the sort that couldn't stand doing group projects in school, so the idea of organizing…

I agree devs carry many dysfunctions.

But big-A Agile is a management school with its own dysfunctions. It diverges from small-a agile, which is basically a set of principles to help critique yourself with.

When you hire a manager (or "Scrum Master" whatever), they must convince top management to give them a job. Which is why Scrum Masters brag about their bosses "believing in" Agile, like a bishop happy that the king loves god. Then they impose some system which requires their highly visible involvement.

(That said, the Agile described in this article diverges from my personal experience.)

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