Agile at 20: The Failed Rebellion • Hacker News Board

Re: Agile at 20: The Failed Rebellion

#161

Post by baxtr » Sun, Jul 25, 2021, 10:05 AM UTC

denton-scratch wrote: post #146

smokey_circles wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The air quotes sell it. It's easy to blame management because developers and engineers haven't the foggiest idea what management actually does. Instead of engaging with that problem, they retreat to themselves where they hiss the name management in dark corners. Fact is: Developers are incapable of self organising, and would drown overnight without management's stiff hand. I absolutely hate how accurate that is becau…

> Fact is: Developers are incapable of self organising, and would drown overnight without management's stiff hand. I beg to differ. A dev team doing agile, with a team leader who is a manager/dev, can definitely self-organise. The team leader interfaces with non-dev management, removes roadblocks, and in collaboration with the rest of the devs sets the direction for a sprint. You need this team lader role to keep the…

> I think that's rather obvious; management runs the business and sells the products. They set the business objectives, and there has to be clear communication between the devs and management, otherwise you get the "rewrite it all in X" syndrome.

That’s a view in many large corporates. However, in product focused companies and many startups every developer has to have a customer focused mind. Every single day.

Re: Agile at 20: The Failed Rebellion

#162

Post by misil » Sun, Jul 25, 2021, 10:10 AM UTC

habitue wrote: post #19

I think the big divide here is between tech companies and non tech companies. Tech companies can look at the agile manifesto and use it as a heuristic guide, because engineers are already kind of on the same page about it. You don't need heavyweight process etc. Non tech-companies need the window dressing of tech companies to retain their best engineers, but ultimately agile is kinda telling them to turn everything u…

This very much resonates with my experience. I've seen this very process take place when working at a small tech startup that ended up being bought by a non-tech giant keen on undergoing a "digitalization" initiative. Our prior processes were lightweight, goal-oriented and effective. No one bothered calling them "agile", they were just the natural way to deal with an ever changing landscape of customer and system requirements.

After the buy-out we were told to undergo a thorough transformation into this brand new unified top-down software development process the company had some consultants design for them. Complete with a baffling array of buzzword driven "agile" development practices and project/squad/team/chapter manager/lead/head roles to be filled. The more you kept inquiring what exactly those roles should entail, the more conflicting and vaguer the answers got until you realized that no one had the faintest idea how any of this was supposed to actually mesh together in practice. The license packages for the expensive project planning software we were to use where long paid however.

Re: Agile at 20: The Failed Rebellion

#163

Post by mjburgess » Sun, Jul 25, 2021, 10:13 AM UTC

travisgriggs wrote: post #64

I was at OOPLSA 1998 where it was going viral. Participated in the early C2 wiki. Participated in some of the early "workshops" on this upstart rebel movement. Raised in a christian tradition, and somewhat a student of history of christianity, I was fascinated by parallels that unfolded in months` time what took place over centuries in christianity. 5 years after the movement began, I found that it felt as watered do…

We are unfortunately saddled with "religion" as the archetype of this behaviour.

Perhaps we could call it, "social virtue mythology".

What is a social virtue mythology? It answers the following questions:

* Why is there evil in the world? (ie., why arent things perfect)

* How do you overcome evil? (ie., become perfect)

* Who is good? Who is evil?

* In what or who should I place my trust?

* etc.

Today we can see many such competing virtue mythologies....

Why is there evil in the world? New Atheists: Religion; Feminism: Patriarchy; Socialists: Capitalism; Idenity-Woke: Essentialism.

Personally I regard this as wholely "mythological" because the questions these social-virtue systems are designed to answer "take place" in a utopian/dystopian reality.

Ie., many people eventually discover that there is no need of this type of mythology: reality is itself flawed. We aren't "owed" a utopia, and thus there is no question to answer.

Here, in agile then we see these patterns even in this thread. Some commenters are still trying to answer the question, "why isnt software design/construction perfect?" as-if there can be a virtue/vice answer, ie., "because we have failed to...".

Rather, no. These problems are irresolvable. The reality of software is intrinsically broken: there is no customer to give you the requirements, there is no habit which elicits them, there is no mechanism to build reliable software, and so on.

Many are extremely loath to confront this reality, especially as adolescents; ie., that they are powerless to build their utopia. The really-existing world has irresolvable contradictions that admit no virtuous resolution.

Re: Agile at 20: The Failed Rebellion

#164

Post by p0nce » Sun, Jul 25, 2021, 10:19 AM UTC

eesmith wrote: post #87

Agile both succeeded and failed because it's defined as "not waterfall." Since no one does pure waterfall, everyone does Agile. Even this essay encourages that interpretation: "Everyone in this group had deep experience writing software, and they were all looking for an alternative to documentation-driven, heavyweight software development processes that ruled the day. " Did that "everyone" include Mac development in…

I don't buy the thesis that everydone was doing software development wrong until a few consultants gathered at a ski resort.

Re: Agile at 20: The Failed Rebellion

#165

Post by SideburnsOfDoom » Sun, Jul 25, 2021, 10:20 AM UTC

ipaddr wrote: post #84

hyperman1 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll give 2 examples. One was a CEO who hadn't any technical background, but he knew what ICT could and could not do for his company. One day we rewired all of our network, a massive weekend job. He was there, even if the only thing he could do was pulling network cables out of bags and straightening them. He saw who and what worked or not, he saw where we struggled even if he didn't understand a word of our technica…

That's not a CEO job. His job is to make sure the enterprise is funded and sets a vision. The first example must be a small company. 2. This sounds like a manager in an enterprise level company If you choose to work where a multi-level manager structure exists you should give that manager respect because he has to navigate a political landscape that takes certain skills. Besides managing people and knowing what custo…

Showing up on for hard jobs and just listening to the people doing it, does set a vision.

Re: Agile at 20: The Failed Rebellion

#166

Post by stunt » Sun, Jul 25, 2021, 10:21 AM UTC

I avoid working at companies that 1) use SAFe, or 2) assign dedicated Scrum Master for dev teams, or 3) use crappy project management tools.

To me that's an indicator that decision makers in those companies have no understanding about software development.

Re: Agile at 20: The Failed Rebellion

#167

Post by SideburnsOfDoom » Sun, Jul 25, 2021, 10:27 AM UTC

p0nce wrote: post #164

eesmith wrote: post #87

Agile both succeeded and failed because it's defined as "not waterfall." Since no one does pure waterfall, everyone does Agile. Even this essay encourages that interpretation: "Everyone in this group had deep experience writing software, and they were all looking for an alternative to documentation-driven, heavyweight software development processes that ruled the day. " Did that "everyone" include Mac development in…

I don't buy the thesis that everydone was doing software development wrong until a few consultants gathered at a ski resort.

Anecdotally, as someone who was doing software development in the late 1990s, yes we were doing it wrong, and Agile spoke truth to that. Getting this message out was an important change. And if that took "a few consultants gathered at a ski resort" issuing a manifesto, then so be it.

Was "Everyone" doing it wrong? Mathematically improbable. Were the vast majority, the mainstream, stuck in a dysfunctional waterfall system? Oh hell yes.

And the usual answer to the failure of up-front planning was "Clearly we didn't plan up-front enough, we need plan even longer". It's a self-reinforcing pathology. So is the use of JIRA, but that's another story, post-agile, not pre-agile.

Re: Agile at 20: The Failed Rebellion

#168

Post by axegon_ » Sun, Jul 25, 2021, 10:27 AM UTC

TameAntelope wrote: post #158

axegon_ wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I spent around 11 years in large companies(anywhere between 300 and 6000 employees). It highly depend on what you work on and what's your work ethic. In all honesty beyond circumstances which were outside my control, I ended up in a small company and just now I realize how much the idiotic bureaucracy truly bothered me. And I'm acknowledging that precisely agile facilitated this hell. I think you are looking at it fr…

There are nearly zero "must spend, at any cost" situations in business, so no I don't agree with you assertion that "it's not a question if something is worth doing". It's always a question if something is worth doing. I've seen your argument many, many times before, and it comes from people who have divorced their understanding of value from their understanding of work. You don't get paid to work, you get paid to pr…

This means you were lucky and got to work in those isolated environments where you never had to migrate such an ancient system without compromise and 100.00% identical operation or dealing with "we must have/support x, no matter what, cost is off the table". I've been through that countless times. Migrating ancient systems, writing drivers for hardware with close to 0 documentation or specification, "ads absolutely immune to ad blockers in our apps", just 3 personal examples where any value for a story point is an arbitrary number and a wild guess at best and where the only thing I got from agile was countless sleepless nights, no weekends or holidays and still barely making it in time. Not because I was locked to a desk but because of my personal working ethic.

Re: Agile at 20: The Failed Rebellion

#169

Post by greatgib » Sun, Jul 25, 2021, 10:28 AM UTC

In my opinion and experience, the best functioning and delivering teams are the one doing Agile without even thinking or saying that they are doing Agile.

It is team that are working intelligently with trust between members. Each member does it job, feels responsible and autonomous. Enough to do by itself everything needed for the project to succeed and with other members trusting him to be able to do what he needs to do without micro management.

Re: Agile at 20: The Failed Rebellion

#170

Post by danparsonson » Sun, Jul 25, 2021, 10:31 AM UTC

forgotmypw17 wrote: post #90

Celeo wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd certainly like to be in an environment that has the dedicated people to those roles that so often are either combined or eschewed entirely, but 16+ hours of meetings per sprint sounds incredibly draining.

It wasn't particularly draining, because the large windows allowed a more relaxed pace, ensuring that nothing was missed, and a time for joking around. And it was not "16+ hours of meetings", but two days of taking a break from coding to do more social work, also having a 2-hour lunch together in the middle :)

Even a two hour lunch break still leaves more than six hours for a retrospective, so, honest question, what do you talk about? I'm used to retrospectives taking about 15-30 minutes, and even then we usually have to scratch around for things to talk about. How can you have six hours of things to discuss after three weeks of work?