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Why do some developers consider Agile development to be nonsense?

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

#131

Post by wilsynet »

davidgerard wrote: post #121
wilsynet wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are doing it wrong. 8 people should not take an hour to say: What did I do yesterday, what am I doing today, is there anything blocking me? There should not be a discussion of every point. The only discussion should be "oh let's talk about that impediment after the meeting with a smaller group of people" or "let me follow up with you after lunch". The standup is 10-15 minutes. If it is longer, it needs to be sto…

So, have you ever said "Anyone going over sixty seconds will be shot" and there's that one guy - or two, or three - who nevertheless always take five minutes? Yeah, turns out you probably can't actually shoot them.

No, but you can cut them off and say "I'm sorry but we need to move on, you have 5 more seconds to finish what you're saying".

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

#132

Post by jacquesm »

outsidetheparty wrote: post #84
jacquesm wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why don't you just kick the agile nonsense overboard and switch back to your old way of doing things?

Oh, believe me, I'm trying.

Best of luck to you, it really sucks to have such theatre forced on you.

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

#133

Post by tsotha »

carsongross wrote: post #129

Agile development is another tick in the long series of desperate attempts by management to avoid The One Thing That Actually Usually Works™: Hire great developers, pay them a ton of money and give them a lot of freedom and time.

I don't see how this makes sense. If I hired a bunch of great developers at great cost I would have even more incentive to maximize their output than I would if I hired a bunch of mediocre people at a lower cost.

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

#134

Post by jackmaney »

lostcolony wrote: post #116
jackmaney wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So what? Let them. They get estimates that are relative to each other (~this~ story will take longer than ~that~ story) First, they'll ask how much longer ~that~ task will take to complete than ~this~ task. Then, they'll ask how long ~this~ task will take to complete. Then, they'll use this little trick called "math"[1]. > and can estimate them however they like if they want to; we're not committing to their estima…

Your experience dictates those things. Mine does not. You claim my experience can not exist. I claim my experience can. You also seem to ignore what I'm saying; we give deadlines. The end of the sprint. Whatever we take on will be done at the end of the sprint; they have control over what we take on by the backlog. Beyond that, we refuse to give any commitment (instead just giving relative weights to how long a task…

> You claim my experience can not exist.

I have done no such thing.

Obvious troll has become quite obvious.

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

#135

Post by davidgerard »

wilsynet wrote: post #131
davidgerard wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, have you ever said "Anyone going over sixty seconds will be shot" and there's that one guy - or two, or three - who nevertheless always take five minutes? Yeah, turns out you probably can't actually shoot them.

No, but you can cut them off and say "I'm sorry but we need to move on, you have 5 more seconds to finish what you're saying".

You can indeed do that. Sometimes they even stop! Not very often, though. Again, the inconvenient lack of actual bullets.

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

#136

Post by pan69 »

Any methodology in the wrong hands will be a terrible experience.

Let's face it. There is no methodology that will make all software development projects around the world go smoothly and fun to work on. If you work with, or for, a bunch of dicks, you won't enjoy what you will be doing all day. No methodology is going to change that.

I would like to go as far to say that "any" methodology used by great people will automatically result in great things.

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

#137

Post by davidgerard »

depr wrote: post #91
davidgerard wrote: post #37

The free e-meter at every desk is a valuable job perk! The Kool-Aid tasted a bit funny, though. Scrum-English Dictionary: * "sprint": artificial crisis * "end of sprint": abandonware * "Scrum master": resume credit for my planned escape to a new company * "stakeholder": someone you can't get away with externalising your costs onto * "simplified": doesn't implement any of the actual business requirements * "lightweigh…

The first and last definitions I find are very accurate. Do more! (Retrospective, velocity, stand-up.)

"Inspect and Adapt": maybe bong hits will fix my makefile

"Project Manager:" a job that no longer needs to exist in the astounding new world of Scrum. (Pay no attention to the project owners, product owners, story-writing users above you in the org chart or Scrum Masters behind the curtain.)

Blog version: http://reddragdiva.dreamwidth.org/594955.html

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

#138

Post by prostoalex »

If you get stuck in an agile environment, here's a survival guide:

1) Attack the lowest-priority and easiest stories to shoot for quantity, not for quality. This way you'll be closing stories in no time, pleasing the scrum master and product owner during the daily standup. Leave the largest and most complex problem for last - if nothing else, you can kick the can down the road by claiming it's tougher than it seemed, requires more points and should be moved into the next scrum.

2) Do not worry about the quality of your work. In fact, the lower it is, the more stories you'll have to fill in the next scrum - "widget for feature X" with some effort can become "fix bug Y with feature X", "improve widget performance when more than 1 user uses the product", "improve logging and monitoring of widget X" and tons of other, lower-priority, but higher-quantity stories (see point 1 of this). You'll likely be closing a story a day, earning points way ahead of the other suckers who choose to focus on long-term critical design/architecture issues.

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

#139

Post by kabdib »

logfromblammo wrote: post #88
goostavos wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Everyone seems to agree that we're doing Agile wrong The fact that we've all heard this line (yet never heard a solution) should make it pretty clear that it's more of a management religion than an engineering practice. "You're doing it wrong" is the perfect built-in, pre-packaged defense to the Agile system that agile managers/consultants/etc can rattle off with zero effort and an air of superiority. Had a bad expe…

> ...doing it wrong... Back when I was a wee lad, with nary a keyboard callus upon my digits, I learned about a little thing called Murphy's Law. In brief, it says that if anything can be done incorrectly, someone will eventually do it that way. It was a warning to those designing things, to make doing the wrong thing impossible, or at least much more difficult to do accidentally. As a result, among those taught abou…

"Weaponized idiocy" has entered my lexicon. Thank you, sir :-)

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

#140

Post by kabdib »

jackmaney wrote: post #73
lostcolony wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, then, to give you a piece of anecdotal evidence; my experience where I currently am is that we never talk about how long it'll take, unless it's so small and trivial we can say "Give me an hour and I should have a first pass in place". Even then we're not saying it's ~done~, just that we're familiar enough with the code that we can get some prototypal code in place in a time frame. When actually estimating task…

"When actually estimating tasks, it's purely point based" The problem is that project managers and other business units don't give two flying shits about points. They want to know when things will be done. PM: "So, how long will it take you to have that new logging system implemented?" Developer: "It's a five point feature." PM: "So....two days, then?" D: "Well, I dunno...it's five points." PM: "Two days it is!" [put…

We had three types of PMs:

- Middle management mover-and-shaker. Most recent technical contribution to a product: Some time in the last ice-age. Super power: secret meetings that lasted for hours, discussing how much all the devs were late, and who to blame.

- Underflunky. Ran daily stand-ups to gather status. Last technical contribution to a product: Never. Perpetually terrified. Super-power: "Since we need this done by the end of today, let's have a bunch of meetings about it. Are you available for an hour at 10, 2 and 5?"

- Fantastically technical PM. Last technical contribution to a product: Helped debug a gnarly problem over in the other building about ten minutes ago. Super-power: Writing intelligent specs that devs understood and that actually described shit that would work. Achilles heel: Incredibly over-worked and a burnout in five months.

We had one or two of the latter PMs on the last project I was on. They were great; every other PM did negative work.

I did get our underflunky PM to start calling our scrum meetings "Status".

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