Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Agile is a Sham

williamedwardscoder.tumblr.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 189 posts

Re: Agile is a Sham

#161

Post by smeg »

Drbble wrote: post #156
smeg wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I could not possibly agree more. Like many early Agile adopters I have been shocked and saddened by what it has become. I think the problem is that brainfucked corporate IT programmers (Java, .NET, whatever) have jumped on the bandwagon and driven it into the sea. I was recently smacked around the head by this in a meeting about how a team was going to implement Jira ticketing to help improve their development proces…

You are saying that Agile is supposed to mean programming in Ruby instead of Java? And only small teams can be Agile? Amazon.com would disagree with you, for one.

"You are saying that Agile is supposed to mean programming in Ruby instead of Java?"

Of course not. But in my experience and observations, corporate IT programmers, especially those with a Java background, are the worst offenders when it comes to abusing the Agile concept and failing to get the basics anywhere near right.

"And only small teams can be Agile? Amazon.com would disagree with you, for one."

I am not saying that, but I think it is a good question. I have never seen a team of hundreds coordinated to an outcome using an Agile approach. I have been involved in large projects with up to 300 people (think multiple, large teams of business analysts, developers, database designers, architects and testers and a little hierarchy of IT project management) work towards a single outcome using a highly managed, strict waterfall approach over several years. It wasn't pretty, but we got there in the end, and I would not swear on the Bible that we could have done the same using Agile.

If Amazon is really using an Agile approach to coordinate hundreds of people working on a single project, I would love to read about it.

Re: Agile is a Sham

#162

Post by Silhouette »

timbre wrote: post #105
DanielBMarkham wrote: post #24

[Obligatory plug and disclaimer: Agile professional who wrote an earlier rant "Agile Ruined my Life" http://www.whattofix.com/blog/archives/2010/09/agile-ruined-... Also I am writing some practical how-to Agile e-books trying to undo some of the damage: http://tiny-giant-books.com/scrummaster.htm ] Just differentiate between what Agile is and how people are pushing Agile on you. Different things entirely. Agile is be…

> The second secret is that most teams, frankly, are not that good. It's so important to remember this, as well as the corollary: I'm not that good myself. The article included this line: > If you need to follow a prescribed process in order to be in any way an effective coder then you are mediocre at best and so is your work and your project. I'm not sure if I agree with the statement itself, although I certainly th…

> I certainly think [...] that the quality of your staff is more important than your process.

I don't think those are independent variables.

In my experience, one of the properties of a good development team is that if a project lacks clear guidelines so the developers can work effectively together, the team will naturally tend to self-organise. They will establish enough ground rules among themselves to collaborate effectively, and they will adopt or create any tools necessary to support that basic process. A good team that does already have a decent process and competent leadership will still naturally review and update that process over time based on their experiences using it.

This also explains why one or two substandard developers on an otherwise competent team are so damaging: they are sufficient to disrupt any reasonable attempt at self-organisation, and the team now requires strong leadership rather than merely collaboration among peers. Unless the leader is capable of both instilling discpline in the rogue elements and simultaneously accepting and promoting good ideas from the remainder of the group, which is a very difficult thing to do even for an experienced manager with good intentions, the result will still be lower performance than a team without the negative elements.

Re: Agile is a Sham

#163

Post by wpietri »

Silhouette wrote: post #151
wpietri wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends on who you're talking about here. Bob Martin one of the craftsmanship people, is very sincere in his desire to make the field better. I'm not sure about who's cropped up lately, though. Also, it's very, very rare for somebody to make a mint on a software book. I've talked with a number of authors, and their universal view is that writing code pays much better than writing a book. You do it because you have so…

> Bob Martin one of the craftsmanship people, is very sincere in his desire to make the field better. Unfortunately, you can be totally sincere in your good intentions, and yet still repeatedly be wrong. When you are a high profile figure who presumes to advise others on the best ways to do their job, that makes you a liability. It's a shame. Some of Bob Martin's earlier work exploring OO and the SOLID principles was…

Could be. I guess I'm not aware of the repeated wrongness on ObjectMentor's part. Got links?

The big problems I saw, though, came from people who weren't particularly sincere. They were happy to sell whatever large companies were buying. E.g., two-day "Scrum Master" courses and a splash of Agile holy water to bless whatever top-down idiocy a company was already engaging in.

Re: Agile is a Sham

#164

Post by wpietri »

wissler wrote: post #149
wpietri wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. And this shit makes me furious. I got involved with this stuff before the term "Agile" existed. At the beginning, it was a bunch of professionals (mostly developers) sincerely trying to find better ways of working. Extreme Programming, for example, came to be because the developers were really interested to experiment with how their team got stuff done. It breaks my heart that in the ensuing decade it has tu…

Glad to see disdain for "agile" is finally becoming mainstream. Now, it may be that someone writing rote software should follow a process, but for anyone doing anything actually innovative, you can't get into their head and tell them what process they must follow, whether waterfall or agile. It's like telling Michelangelo the process for sculpting. Rather than teaching people processes, they should help foster better…

I think you can't effectively impose process, but I do think that good teams can happily decide what process they're going to follow. Which is how we got Extreme Programming in the first place.

Re: Agile is a Sham

#165

Post by wpietri »

itsreallynotme wrote: post #123
vannevar wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No but communication is part of any effective process. Standup is just having everyone say what they accomplished yesterday and what they're planning on doing today. If you're on a team with more than three or four people, it's a useful way to get a quick summary of where everyone's at. Some people are good at letting other people know when they're stuck, but some aren't, and if you've got the latter on your team sta…

No amount of process can fix bad communication. Standups are an attempt at that. Teams that have good communication succeed more, and standups aren't integral to their success. Teams with bad communication fail more, and standups can't help them. Sales teams and sports teams don't work as a comparison, they aren't building something (sales is a particularly bad example, most sales team members are in direct competiti…

Personally, I like having a daily stand-up. So do my colleagues. First thing in the morning is a great time to sync up on things.

I have seen places that do them poorly, and I gather that's what you've experienced. But it's also possible to do them well.

Re: Agile is a Sham

#166

Post by brazzy »

itsreallynotme wrote: post #126
brazzy wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, if you mean "Programming is a process" to include techniques of effective collaboration, then agile is part of programming. Claiming that people who try to define methods to do that better "don't know a fucking thing about programming" is A) a non-sequitur and B) indicates that you don't collaborate well, period. No, Cowboy is not a compliment. It means a hard worker who takes the shortest path to the greatest…

You say "techniques of effective collaboration", I say "talking to people". If you need guidelines for that, that's cool. The thing that suggests to me that you and I wouldn't work well together is that you make broad value judgements based on twisted interpretation and extrapolation of these comment threads.

And you don't?

Re: Agile is a Sham

#167

Post by wpietri »

itsreallynotme wrote: post #98
gnaffle wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The software that keeps all modern airliners in the sky is written by companies that have lots and lots of process. Do you think those software projects are doomed from the jump just because there's a lot of process involved?

Processes implemented to save lives are the product of death, and the process is put there to slow things down. Ask your friendly agile consultant how much their process is going to slow down your company. They will tell you that Agile will make you faster. They might even be right, if it's replacing a bigger, worse process that already exists on top of the process of software development. But if it's adding a layer,…

That's not obviously true to me.

Any professional has some process, explicit or implicit: it's the observable regularities in the way they work.

Any team is going to have some explicit process, because there's no way people will converge on the maximally effective way of working together without some discussion.

So as far as I can tell, what you're saying is that it's impossible to take any process ideas from an external source, because every team is already maximally efficient. That doesn't make much sense to me.

In our case, the process we've converged on is the most efficient one we can find. But we're always looking for ways to make it more efficient.

Re: Agile is a Sham

#169

Post by itsreallynotme »

vannevar wrote: post #154
itsreallynotme wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A 15-minute standup isn't going to hurt a good team's productivity, while it could greatly improve the productivity of a mediocre team. It takes a lot to noticeably hurt a good team's productivity. But it's mean, just fucking mean , to punish a good, productive, communicative team with more process because you also manage crappy teams.

[I]t's mean, just fucking mean, to punish a good, productive, communicative team... I didn't say standups don't benefit good teams; quite the opposite. You've missed (or ignored) my point that even good communicators miss conveying important information sometimes. And if the team is really so naturally communicative, they're hardly going to view a standup as punishment. Again, I have to really wonder what kind of sta…

Either way, it's nothing to get worked up over.

Oh, I agree. My language was for emphasis, not representative of an emotional state. It's interesting to talk to someone who thinks that the same process can save a bad team and make a good team better. That though had certainly never occurred to me.

Re: Agile is a Sham

#170

Post by zbuc »

babebridou wrote: post #138
zbuc wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yet it never occurs to them when dividing people into groups that maybe they're the incompetent ones... Who's more competent? The person using Agile successfully and getting things done, the guy using no specific development process and getting things done, or the guy writing long blog posts about why he doesn't care for a development process he doesn't understand and doesn't need to participate in if he doesn't enjo…

I'm currently on two missions. In one of these, we kick ass. Deliver on schedule or even in advance. It's scrum, we simply work as a team of four and ship, ship, ship, ship, feature after feature and fix after fix. We have our hands free, management is trusting our cell with the strategic future of their Tech tree, and we deliver. In the other mission, I am not making this up, I spend 1hour/day on poor excuses of sta…

The first you. The second you needs to run far away from what he's doing. :)

I was in that situation before -- bad agile is BAD. I was on a team of 4 developers with literally 8 project managers. I know how that daily 1 hour crappy stand up goes. I also know how it feels to have deliverables for half the project managers in any given week, and what it's like to get constantly interrupted by 8 different people during your minimal development time to answer non-urgent questions.

But you know what? Not everywhere is like that and you usually have a choice to find something else. You're obviously competent enough to find something else; you already have two things going on.

If they aren't doing it right and they aren't listening and you aren't happy, GTFO.

Post reply on HN