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Why do developers at Google consider Agile development to be nonsense? (2016)

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Re: Why do developers at Google consider Agile development to be nonsense? (2016)

#231

Post by hiccuphippo »

js2 wrote: post #29

> This type of innovation takes significant up-front design time, and working on components over longer than one week iterations. Because the projects have such simple external interfaces, and so much internal complexity, much of the work is not even visible to “customers”, so there is no way to write customer visible stories about it. This type of software takes 8–20 months to deliver the first working version to th…

Why would meeting expectations put people at risk of being terminated? Do they expect one to do more work than one was payed to do?

Re: Why do developers at Google consider Agile development to be nonsense? (2016)

#232

Post by ahupp »

js2 wrote: post #29

> This type of innovation takes significant up-front design time, and working on components over longer than one week iterations. Because the projects have such simple external interfaces, and so much internal complexity, much of the work is not even visible to “customers”, so there is no way to write customer visible stories about it. This type of software takes 8–20 months to deliver the first working version to th…

Ugh. If "meets expectations" puts you in the bottom 5% this says to me that there's wild miscalibration in the review process; e.g not everyone is using the same standard for "meets" and some teams have inflation going on. At my last employer we had lot of cross-review between teams to make sure everyone applies a similar the same standard, just to avoid this problem.

Re: Why do developers at Google consider Agile development to be nonsense? (2016)

#233

Post by kragen »

kragen wrote: post #200
paganel wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In that programmers are supposed to be creative, over-deliver, etc. Like I said, I don't want the programmer in charge of the software that manages my financial or health records to be creative or over-deliver, quite the contrary. I'd add personal-data to the mix, and now I've covered a huge chunk of SV companies. I think that the era of "move fast and break things" should be over by now, unfortunately relatively p…

You'd like your financial and health records to be managed by average-quality software? That is, software that's full of bugs, confuses its users into making lots of eyes, and is insecure? I'd rather have them managed by file clerks on paper if that's what's on offer on the software side.

Lots of errors, not lots of eyes. This error brought to you by my failure to successfully use well-above-average software written by Googlers.

Re: Why do developers at Google consider Agile development to be nonsense? (2016)

#234

Post by utopian3 »

mav3rick wrote: post #230
utopian3 wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You missed the point by two miles. I still use Hangouts, but they’ve introduced 12 other apps in the last 10 years that do the exact same thing. All while making Hangouts / google chat / gTalk (whatever it was originally called in Labs) worse.

Google is good at a lot of things. Messaging strategy is not one of them. HN just hates Google doing well in anything so the expected harping on messaging.

Thank you for agreeing with me.

Re: Why do developers at Google consider Agile development to be nonsense? (2016)

#235

Post by utopian3 »

mav3rick wrote: post #230
utopian3 wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You missed the point by two miles. I still use Hangouts, but they’ve introduced 12 other apps in the last 10 years that do the exact same thing. All while making Hangouts / google chat / gTalk (whatever it was originally called in Labs) worse.

Google is good at a lot of things. Messaging strategy is not one of them. HN just hates Google doing well in anything so the expected harping on messaging.

https://joelx.com/google-discontinues-hangouts-on-air/15177/

Re: Why do developers at Google consider Agile development to be nonsense? (2016)

#236

Post by thewileyone »

The worst part about Agile is that non-technical technical managers that I worked with, convinced the non-technical business managers that using Agile would lead to more and better innovation. And that's how they got training and pseudo-experience to pad their resumes.

Re: Why do developers at Google consider Agile development to be nonsense? (2016)

#237

Post by mav3rick »

utopian3 wrote: post #234
mav3rick wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google is good at a lot of things. Messaging strategy is not one of them. HN just hates Google doing well in anything so the expected harping on messaging.

Thank you for agreeing with me.

Big companies have many blind spots. There is nothing new here.

Re: Why do developers at Google consider Agile development to be nonsense? (2016)

#238

Post by profalseidol »

GordonS wrote: post #217
empath75 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My biggest criticism of Agile and Scrum is that it assumes that you can just plan out how a feature will work by sitting in a meeting and talking about it. Then spend the next two weeks implementing that plan. They don’t, there are ‘spikes’ that are just time spent researching or exploring or designing rather than implementing. If your scrum master is telling the team what they can’t or can’t do, or how they should…

> If your scrum master is telling the team what they can’t or can’t do, or how they should do their jobs, they are doing it wrong Unfortunately in my experience this does happen quite often. I've found the biggest issue with scrum is when people (usually the scrum master and PM) take hard-line, dogmatic views of scrum processes.

There's this course in pluralsight that talks about two orgs that promote scrum. The other one seems to be giving out the wrong ideas. I think it's this one (copied from wikipedia):

    In 2002, Schwaber with others founded the Scrum 
    Alliance[18] and set up the Certified Scrum accreditation 
    series. Schwaber left the Scrum Alliance in late 2009 and 
    founded Scrum.org which oversees the parallel Professional 
    Scrum accreditation series.[19]
I think it was Scrum Alliance that's giving out ideas like Burndown chart is required in scrum.

Re: Why do developers at Google consider Agile development to be nonsense? (2016)

#239

Post by solidasparagus »

tom_ wrote: post #159
solidasparagus wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

'The masses' refers to the lower classes (look at any dictionary and how the word has historically been used - 'opiate of the masses', 'the unwashed masses'). It would not typically be correct to say that a Googler is part of the lower classer. 'The masses' is definitely not the same as 'everyone'.

Another way of putting it: words have connotations as well as meanings. People do sometimes seem to forget this! - so it's good to have a reminder.

Well put
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