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Agile Is a Glass Cannon

tomdalling.com

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Re: Agile Is a Glass Cannon

#21

Post by r_hoods_ghost »

pflenker wrote: post #6
ljf wrote: post #3

Good article. I think the issue is the often 'higher ups' want 'Agile' as they've heard it is faster and/or cheaper - missing the part that it is faster and cheaper to fail with agile. If you know exactly what you want and are happy to wait, then an agile methodology probably isn't for you. If you need to test something out or scratch an itch now , then agile might be a good fit (depending on the skills/buy in/experi…

The comparison to home building is not a good one - houses are things which are repeated, with customizations and slight modifications, and people are deeply familiar with houses. The closest analogy in the software world would be simple websites such as blog or easy shops, where e.g. a WordPress plus some customizations would be enough. Software is completely different though. Building chatgpt is vastly different fr…

I hear this a lot. The counter argument is virtually no one is going from implementing chat gpt as project 1 to implementing google maps as project 2. In fact they are going from implementing v1 of google Maps to v1.1.

When I worked as a kitchen fitter there was a much greater difference between projects that anything I've experienced with a single employer as a dev. Fitting a top end kitchen in a listed 500 year old cottage is vastly different to fitting a budget kitchen in a new build, to fitting a period appropriate kitchen in a 1930s town house. Building out the next version of an API or writing a rendered, not so much.

I think a lot of Devs have a vastly inflated sense of the "uniqueness" of what they are implementing, and I think a lot of that derives from the industries obsession with reinventing the wheel, NIH syndrome and fashion driven development.

Re: Agile Is a Glass Cannon

#22

Post by nikau »

jayd16 wrote: post #13

Kinda misses the entire point of 'agile' which is a way to adjust to and gather changing requirements in an iterative process. It's a risk _mitigation_ strategy. I'm not sure I agree that anything is a glass cannon because it could work but you could also do it wrong so it could fail. If a team can't pull off agile what do they think would have been a safer strategy?

> gather changing requirements in an iterative process.

But you can't have processes, after all its "individuals and interactions over processes and tools".

Re: Agile Is a Glass Cannon

#23

Post by tempodox »

That article makes a lot of sense. I've seen several mediocre shops that treated their version of Agile like it was a magic wand that makes everything better, when all they wanted was more control and another fashionable buzzword. Even if they knew how to hire folks who could do real agile development, they wouldn't want to because it would mean relinquishing some of that control.

Re: Agile Is a Glass Cannon

#24

Post by nikau »

ljf wrote: post #3

Good article. I think the issue is the often 'higher ups' want 'Agile' as they've heard it is faster and/or cheaper - missing the part that it is faster and cheaper to fail with agile. If you know exactly what you want and are happy to wait, then an agile methodology probably isn't for you. If you need to test something out or scratch an itch now , then agile might be a good fit (depending on the skills/buy in/experi…

> heard it is faster and/or cheaper

This has been my experience with agile - it works OK if you have more expensive experienced staff who can make smart decisions and work autonomously.

The problem is the company wants to hire/outsource the cheapest staff possible who do better with defined processes and standards.

Re: Agile Is a Glass Cannon

#25

Post by rolisz »

jdlshore wrote: post #19
jen729w wrote: post #4

Anyone else notice Agile creeping in where it has no place being? I’m suffering on an infrastructure transformation project — migrating complex apps to Azure — which insists on being Agile. It’s preposterous. I just started and already I’ve counted up 40 person-hours of time in ‘planning’ sessions. I spent two hours in a room with an architect and a whiteboard and then one single day myself on Thursday building a sch…

> Anyone else notice Agile creeping in where it has no place being? Eh, not really. Agile is barely practiced by any companies. What most practice is a gawdawful abomination of micromanagement and iterative waterfall that they have the audacity to call it “Agile.” Agile is clearly defined in the Agile Manifesto. (Don’t forget the principles on a second page.) All you have to do is treat it like a checklist and you’ll…

Yes and no. Yes, the principles of Agile sound nice, but no, I've never seen them done properly. At every company where I've worked, when Agile got adopted, things went downhill

Re: Agile Is a Glass Cannon

#26

Post by dragonwriter »

jen729w wrote: post #4

Anyone else notice Agile creeping in where it has no place being? I’m suffering on an infrastructure transformation project — migrating complex apps to Azure — which insists on being Agile. It’s preposterous. I just started and already I’ve counted up 40 person-hours of time in ‘planning’ sessions. I spent two hours in a room with an architect and a whiteboard and then one single day myself on Thursday building a sch…

> Anyone else notice Agile creeping in where it has no place being?

I rarely even see Agile creeping in where it does belong and is being advertised as being practiced.

> I’m suffering on an infrastructure transformation project — migrating complex apps to Azure — which insists on being Agile. It’s preposterous. I just started and already I’ve counted up 40 person-hours of time in ‘planning’ sessions.

If you’ve just started and you’ve counted up 40-hours of person-time in planning sessions on one team and not also 600+ person-hours of substantive working time, whatever it is, its not “Agile”.

> They’re shoe-horning infrastructure transformation in to ‘epics’ and ‘features’ and ‘sprints’ and who knows what the fuck they’re doing and next week I think I’m going to actually lose my shit and tell them they’re maniacs.

“Epics”, “Features”, and “Sprints” do not appear in the Agile Manifesto or Principles; a team which is Agile might use them, but using them isn’t a sign of being Agile.

Re: Agile Is a Glass Cannon

#27

Post by bramblerose »

nikau wrote: post #22
jayd16 wrote: post #13

Kinda misses the entire point of 'agile' which is a way to adjust to and gather changing requirements in an iterative process. It's a risk _mitigation_ strategy. I'm not sure I agree that anything is a glass cannon because it could work but you could also do it wrong so it could fail. If a team can't pull off agile what do they think would have been a safer strategy?

> gather changing requirements in an iterative process. But you can't have processes, after all its "individuals and interactions over processes and tools".

"That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more."

Re: Agile Is a Glass Cannon

#29

Post by nikau »

bramblerose wrote: post #27
nikau wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> gather changing requirements in an iterative process. But you can't have processes, after all its "individuals and interactions over processes and tools".

"That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more."

sounds more like "do as i say not do as i do"
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