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Agile Is Dead (Long Live Agility)

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Re: Agile Is Dead (Long Live Agility)

#111

Post by astrange »

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.

Although it's a little off topic, I'm fascinated by how much time 2000s bloggers spent namedropping all the other bloggers (see paragraph 2).

When someone mentions your name all the time, they're trying to sell you something, but what did it mean to mention other people's names all the time? If they're selling the message that they're Spolsky's close personal friend, it's hardly working.

I guess it lets you steal their page views if you summarize their post…

Re: Agile Is Dead (Long Live Agility)

#112

Post by emmelaich »

ternaryoperator wrote: post #109
RogerL wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked on big government projects using military standards that more or less imposed the dreaded 'waterfall'. What was our mantra? "Design a little, code a little, test a little". Agile re-invented or popularized various ideas that had been around for a long time. As always, you adjust for the problem at hand. Royce, the so-called inventor of waterfall (he presented it as an obviously flawed concept, a straw man),…

>"Design a little, code a little, test a little". That's not waterfall as used in the conventional sense. A key element of waterfall was/is: "Thus the waterfall model maintains that one should move to a phase only when its preceding phase is reviewed and verified."[1] >The details vary, to be sure, but the fundamentals remain the same. I disagree. Agile is distincly different at a fundamental level from waterfall. If…

People should stop using the term waterfall to describe any real process. It's only been used to describe a fictitious cartoon of a process, purely for the sake of their argument.

That wikipedia article is a bit of a mess, but read the article at footnote 7:

  http://www.idinews.com/waterfall.html
"There's no such thing as the Waterfall Approach! (and there never was)"

Re: Agile Is Dead (Long Live Agility)

#113

Post by masomenos »

emmelaich wrote: post #112
ternaryoperator wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>"Design a little, code a little, test a little". That's not waterfall as used in the conventional sense. A key element of waterfall was/is: "Thus the waterfall model maintains that one should move to a phase only when its preceding phase is reviewed and verified."[1] >The details vary, to be sure, but the fundamentals remain the same. I disagree. Agile is distincly different at a fundamental level from waterfall. If…

People should stop using the term waterfall to describe any real process. It's only been used to describe a fictitious cartoon of a process, purely for the sake of their argument. That wikipedia article is a bit of a mess, but read the article at footnote 7: http://www.idinews.com/waterfall.html "There's no such thing as the Waterfall Approach! (and there never was)"

If only that were true! My first employer was a large organization that explicitly embraced the waterfall methodology that we all rightfully deride.

Re: Agile Is Dead (Long Live Agility)

#115

Post by jasonwocky »

emmelaich wrote: post #112
ternaryoperator wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>"Design a little, code a little, test a little". That's not waterfall as used in the conventional sense. A key element of waterfall was/is: "Thus the waterfall model maintains that one should move to a phase only when its preceding phase is reviewed and verified."[1] >The details vary, to be sure, but the fundamentals remain the same. I disagree. Agile is distincly different at a fundamental level from waterfall. If…

People should stop using the term waterfall to describe any real process. It's only been used to describe a fictitious cartoon of a process, purely for the sake of their argument. That wikipedia article is a bit of a mess, but read the article at footnote 7: http://www.idinews.com/waterfall.html "There's no such thing as the Waterfall Approach! (and there never was)"

There may have been no capital-W Waterfall approach, but implying that projects weren't routinely being run in a waterfall-esque, staged-handoff fashion smacks of revisionism.

I was there. I was on those projects. They existed, and unless everything went perfectly according to plan, they were messes.

Re: Agile Is Dead (Long Live Agility)

#116

Post by nardi »

fsloth wrote: post #33
nardi wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think they worded it correctly. Notice it doesn't say, "Responding to Change over Making a Plan." Your version is horribly ugly. Theirs is succinct and poetic.

I agree that my version is horribly ugly :). However, if you are not going to Follow a Plan, and while you're at it, you are attempting to Eliminate Waste as per the lean thinking movement, one may quickly follow with the conclusion that plans that are not followed are wasteful, and therefore unnecessary. My experience has shown me that this is the interpretation people very often make. YMMV as always, though.

Preferring to Respond to Change over Follow a Plan doesn't mean you never follow the plan. It means that when changing circumstances conflict with your plan, then you respond to the change rather than blindly follow your plan.

Re: Agile Is Dead (Long Live Agility)

#117

Post by vorg »

mcv wrote: post #21

I understand what he says, but from a grammar perspective, he's wrong. He complains that Agile, which started out as an adjective, has been turned into a noun. He wants it to be an adverb instead, so he introduces agility, which already is a noun. And then he says it's not a noun. (I'm sorry, but I just couldn't not point that out.) But other than that, I agree. What should be making our work easier has been turned i…

> He complains that Agile, which started out as an adjective, has been turned into a noun.

The only programming languages I know of that use adjectives for their names are "Basic" and "Groovy". So this suggests when adjectives are used as nouns is a strong indicator of consultants flogging faulty processes and products for both development methodologies and programming languages alike.

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