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

Agile Is Dead (Long Live Agility)

pragdave.me

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 117 posts

Re: Agile Is Dead (Long Live Agility)

#21

Post by mcv »

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 into something complex by itself. Though in a sense, maybe that's unavoidable. Not everybody truly groks agility, so they have to be taught, which means training and certification. Although personally I think if you don't innately understand it, you can't learn it in a workshop either. Maybe you need to discover it through experience, and I know people who never will.

So where does that leave us? Only the people who grok agility should work this way, and those who don't should stick to something else? What about the companies who want the hip new buzzword, but also want to have some handle on the process they're using?

An agile process like Scrum definitely fills a need, but I've also learned that Scrum in one place can be totally different from Scrum in another place. Nobody completely follows all the ideas of Scrum, but maybe that's as it should be: adapt what you do to what you need. And there may be a limit to the amount of agility some companies can deal with.

Re: Agile Is Dead (Long Live Agility)

#22

Post by gadders »

fsloth wrote: post #3

Personally I find that this line "Responding to Change over Following a Plan" does much more harm than good. It should read "You should have a plan but should rather be prepared to change it constantly than stick with it dogmatically". I would say that when you are within a project team it should emphasize the agile values but once you are on an organizational level where several project teams need to co-operate to d…

>> "Under 2.4, can we have more jobs in the jobstore and is the console more optimized?"

I agree with this. You create a plan so you have an idea when the project will finish, when resources will become free, when you deliver to other dependent teams etc. That doesn't mean the plan is cast in stone and once the Gantt Chart is finished, it never changes.

Obviously, you do what you can with scope, resource moving, etc to keep to original dates but if you can't, then the plan should be updated to reflect reality.

Re: Agile Is Dead (Long Live Agility)

#23

Post by mcv »

mpweiher wrote: post #19
bananas wrote: post #7

I found that no methodology works as well as getting the right people in and let them organise themselves. If you have the wrong people, it doesn't matter what methodology or process you bring in, you're screwed. On that basis, methodology isn't that relevant. I just watched a company apply SCRUM to apparently solve process problems and it just made things worse because the staff aren't disciplined or interested in w…

"getting the right people in and let them organize themselves" That's a large part of what agility was/is about. The rest also matches up pretty well.

The problem is that there are a lot of people who don't organize themselves, and need some sort of structure. So maybe they're not so suitable for agile development, and maybe you shouldn't hire them, but that really limits the labour pool, and in the end, someone is going to hire those people. We still need a way to make those people productive.

And they should be hired; they're often perfectly competent programmers, testers, etc, just not so good at working effectively with this kind of agility.

Re: Agile Is Dead (Long Live Agility)

#24

Post by Angostura »

fsloth wrote: post #3

Personally I find that this line "Responding to Change over Following a Plan" does much more harm than good. It should read "You should have a plan but should rather be prepared to change it constantly than stick with it dogmatically". I would say that when you are within a project team it should emphasize the agile values but once you are on an organizational level where several project teams need to co-operate to d…

> It should read "You should have a plan but should rather be prepared to change it constantly than stick with it dogmatically".

I'm going to steal this. Spot on.

Re: Agile Is Dead (Long Live Agility)

#25

Post by mcv »

planetjones wrote: post #13

Well said. A friend of mine is another company are supposedly moving to "Agile". Their approach is to have whole day meetings to discuss how it will work! Three months later they're still planning how their Agile, Scrum based thing will work. The conferences, the consultancies, the big companies, etc. really have destroyed the essence of the Agile manifesto in many ways.

It's not that they've destroyed the essence of the manifesto, it's that the organization is simply inherently not agile, and incapable of dealing with agility. This is pretty common for large organizations (thought there are also a lot where it kind of works). Their real problem isn't so much the introduction of Scrum, it's changing the very nature and culture of their organization. They should focus on that first, and then Scrum will follow naturally.

Re: Agile Is Dead (Long Live Agility)

#26

Post by mcv »

fsloth wrote: post #3

Personally I find that this line "Responding to Change over Following a Plan" does much more harm than good. It should read "You should have a plan but should rather be prepared to change it constantly than stick with it dogmatically". I would say that when you are within a project team it should emphasize the agile values but once you are on an organizational level where several project teams need to co-operate to d…

> Personally I find that this line "Responding to Change over Following a Plan" does much more harm than good. It should read "You should have a plan but should rather be prepared to change it constantly than stick with it dogmatically".

For all the points in the Agile Manifesto, the right hand term isn't bad at all. It's a good and important thing, but the left hand term is even more important. Plans and processes (in a large organization) are definitely important, but they should never trump change and people. Documentation is also important, just not as important as working code. Contract negotiation is unavoidably important in any business environment, but don't let it get in the way of cooperation.

Re: Agile Is Dead (Long Live Agility)

#28

Post by hox »

Ingon wrote: post #8

Yeah Agile is used as a way to make money now days. For what other reason there are Agile consultants, Agile agencies and Agile certification. I firmly believe that Agile is about doing what makes sense in this team right now. You let the team to decide on their process, on their way of work and get away. And for good managers this is enough - you are empowering your team to succeed. Recently I had a great success de…

What was it about your standups that were hurting your team?

I'm on the fence with daily standup meetings. they definitely can help a team communicate when there are a large number of external forces at play in a larger organization and if there are no underlying asynchronous communication channels available. on the other hand, in a team that communicates regularly with historical communications available to new team members, they aren't as useful.

Re: Agile Is Dead (Long Live Agility)

#29

Post by mcv »

alphadevx wrote: post #18

I once attended a meeting where a manager said "We won't be doing agile, but we will work with more agility", which basically translated to we won't be changing our existing process. Agile to me is real: it has not been diluted as I know exactly how I will implement an agile process (scrum in my instance). I don't care if others misuse or misunderstand the term. For me it's concrete.

> "We won't be doing agile, but we will work with more agility"

At a previous client, I was sitting next to a really nice poster that emphasized the difference between "doing agile" and "being agile". You don't "do" agile. That's simply not a thing. You have to be agile.

Working with more agility is totally fine. But if you do that, it means you won't be sticking blindly to your existing process, it means you should consider what you actually need from that process.

Re: Agile Is Dead (Long Live Agility)

#30

Post by mattmanser »

bananas wrote: post #20
mpweiher wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"getting the right people in and let them organize themselves" That's a large part of what agility was/is about. The rest also matches up pretty well.

Actually I disagree. The large part (possibly not the intent) was about building a consulting empire around something utterly vague with multiple religious opinions about the best way to perform these manifesto actions. A vehicle for rats.

In much nicer terms as he worked with them, that's the gist of what the article is about. Did you read it?
Post reply on HN