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Cargo Cult Agile (2008)

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Re: Cargo Cult Agile (2008)

#101

Post by overgard »

pdelbarba wrote: post #91
overgard wrote: post #87

This is anecdotal, but I've found that the more "agile" a place is, the more underworked I am. In most non-agile places, if im out of work its up to me to find a way to make myself useful (agency!), but in agile environments I usually am told not to take something on because "it wont fit in the sprint". I generally think agiles main benefit is bringing the low performers up to average, but at the cost of handcuffing…

When I worked with a bigger agile group one of the things I liked was having a task list put together and then divided up among everyone but also having an 'on-deck' group for stuff we didn't think we'd have time for. Anyone who got things done faster would have their pick of the on deck work and was some extra freedom and recognition for doing so.

Its a nice idea in theory, but generally ive found these reserve backlogs are full of things nobody actually wants to do, they just think itd be vaguely nice if someone else did it. Its either stuff with no direct business value (refactor the flargenstock), or high-risk/low reward work

Re: Cargo Cult Agile (2008)

#102

Post by overgard »

zer0tonin wrote: post #2

I should explain that to my boss, we're literally doing waterfall but with standup meetings...

Is waterfall even a thing? I feel like the software industry is constantly coming up with solutions to cultural problems that were more relevant in 1977 than 2017

Ive worked at places that werent "agile" and it wasnt the strawman experience of waterfall.. it was just people doing work. They just didnt make a big deal about squeezing everything in a two week window and avoided uncomfortable/useless planning and retrospective meetings.

Re: Cargo Cult Agile (2008)

#103

Post by overgard »

shanemhansen wrote: post #90
overgard wrote: post #87

This is anecdotal, but I've found that the more "agile" a place is, the more underworked I am. In most non-agile places, if im out of work its up to me to find a way to make myself useful (agency!), but in agile environments I usually am told not to take something on because "it wont fit in the sprint". I generally think agiles main benefit is bringing the low performers up to average, but at the cost of handcuffing…

> bringing the low performers up to average, but at the cost of handcuffing your top performers. Sounds about right. If you view humans as interchangeable resources then predictable performance is good. Most businesses don't need or benefit from a Linus Torvalds to build their CRUD app.

Sadly true, although weirdly given most companies hiring practices they apparently think they need Linus to build their facebook for cats app.

Re: Cargo Cult Agile (2008)

#104

Post by overgard »

Nursie wrote: post #22

To echo another comment on here - Daily standups have been the most useful development I've seen in my 17 year career so far, I'm not sure why there's the hate for them. It's a small time allotment where everyone gets just a couple of minutes to sum up where they were yesterday, where they're going today and what's holding them up. I've seen them go wrong, when managers decide that they need to attend and use part of…

Maybe its useful to you, but to be honest, I cant remember a single thing about the standup meeting I had today and I made a point of paying attention. People talk about like "blockers", but if something is blocking me I just go talk to whoever can fix that, and if I need to know about something I just ask people to loop me in. I dont need agile for basic communication skills

Re: Cargo Cult Agile (2008)

#105

Post by jaggederest »

Chris2048 wrote: post #46
jaggederest wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Agile can never work in an agency, where the client has control over budgets, deadlines, and features. There is simply no incentive for the client to compromise when your agency has made some pretty ridiculous promises and put themselves on the hook to deliver. There's an interesting triad that I've been talking to people about a lot recently. 1. Authority (the ability to make decisions of importance) 2. Accountabi…

I'd change the labels a little, since I think those terms are overloaded: I think 'authority' is 'agency', or 'self-determination', 'accountability' is 'direction'/'awareness'/'sensitivity'/'comprehension', 'Responsibility' is actually 'motivation': It also might matter if this is 'pride', or 'avoiding blame', and to what degree it is 'reactive' and 'proactive'. Obviously, knowing what you are responsible for, and ha…

I wouldn't change those labels, actually, the responsibility-accountability-authority triad is pretty well known if you google. It's just not familiar to most folks in programming I guess.

Re: Cargo Cult Agile (2008)

#106

Post by ashark »

humanrebar wrote: post #72
dasmoth wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Daily standups have been the most useful development I've seen in my 17 year career so far, I'm not sure why there's the hate for them. Two things that bother me: 1) You either have to hold them at the start of the working day (in which case they become a synchronization point and everyone has to turn up at the same time -- which will inevitable be a bad time for some people) or a bit later (in which case you end up…

> asynchronous stand ups in a chat client I've been thinking this is actually the perfect standup. People don't tend to write novels in chat clients anyway (and to the extent they do, you can move the text to a README or wiki and just link it). Does anyone have any experience with this? Any pros and cons worth mentioning?

We do. Post in Slack. It's great because you can ignore anything that doesn't mention you (which is what people do in napping-while-standing IRL standups anyway) but you can always go back and see what someone's up to if it becomes relevant.

Well, I wrote "great", but the latter case should be handled by other tools anyway. So really the whole thing could be replaced by just at-mentioning someone who needs to know what you're doing, when they need to know it. Which is just, you know, normal communication. But if you must do standups this is the way to do it, I guess, since it does the least harm.

Re: Cargo Cult Agile (2008)

#107

Post by pdelbarba »

overgard wrote: post #101
pdelbarba wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I worked with a bigger agile group one of the things I liked was having a task list put together and then divided up among everyone but also having an 'on-deck' group for stuff we didn't think we'd have time for. Anyone who got things done faster would have their pick of the on deck work and was some extra freedom and recognition for doing so.

Its a nice idea in theory, but generally ive found these reserve backlogs are full of things nobody actually wants to do, they just think itd be vaguely nice if someone else did it. Its either stuff with no direct business value (refactor the flargenstock), or high-risk/low reward work

Yea, I think you have to do it well. In general for us it was either fun extra features that product management wasn't super excited about or stuff that was just planned for later.

Re: Cargo Cult Agile (2008)

#108

Post by Nursie »

overgard wrote: post #104
Nursie wrote: post #22

To echo another comment on here - Daily standups have been the most useful development I've seen in my 17 year career so far, I'm not sure why there's the hate for them. It's a small time allotment where everyone gets just a couple of minutes to sum up where they were yesterday, where they're going today and what's holding them up. I've seen them go wrong, when managers decide that they need to attend and use part of…

Maybe its useful to you, but to be honest, I cant remember a single thing about the standup meeting I had today and I made a point of paying attention. People talk about like "blockers", but if something is blocking me I just go talk to whoever can fix that, and if I need to know about something I just ask people to loop me in. I dont need agile for basic communication skills

You don't need to remember what happened this morning particularly, so long as you participated.

Great for blockers you know how to fix or who to ask, but you may miss some others.

"I need permissions on this server to do X and am waiting for someone to do that" might have an easy workaround that a colleague knows.

"I'm doing X but it's taking some time because I'm not familiar with Y" might be met with someone offering to help as they have experience you didn't know about.

You'd never get this without some form of generalised conversation.

Re: Cargo Cult Agile (2008)

#109

Post by humanrebar »

Nursie wrote: post #86
humanrebar wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Those other tools have a tendency to get ignored... That's basically my point. Managers should home their craft and improve their tools instead of molding the people around them to meet the needs of middle management.

Well, I'm not sure that the daily standups have always been about that, and as a developer I've found them useful.

I've found them useful, but only to the extent that they focus on burndown and not presenting status reports to management while the rest of the team listens.

Re: Cargo Cult Agile (2008)

#110

Post by overgard »

Nursie wrote: post #108
overgard wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe its useful to you, but to be honest, I cant remember a single thing about the standup meeting I had today and I made a point of paying attention. People talk about like "blockers", but if something is blocking me I just go talk to whoever can fix that, and if I need to know about something I just ask people to loop me in. I dont need agile for basic communication skills

You don't need to remember what happened this morning particularly, so long as you participated. Great for blockers you know how to fix or who to ask, but you may miss some others. "I need permissions on this server to do X and am waiting for someone to do that" might have an easy workaround that a colleague knows. "I'm doing X but it's taking some time because I'm not familiar with Y" might be met with someone offer…

I feel like I can get all of the things you mentioned without a mandatory daily meeting, either through slack, email, or just conversing with someone. It's not that the daily standup bothers me per se, but lets calculate this out for a second. If the daily standup eats about 15 minutes, and you work about 250 days a year, thats about 3500 minutes spent in a scrum. Considering that, even being charitable, I might hear one useful thing every two weeks... I kinda would rather spend those 3500 minutes elsewhere
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