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

Agile Is a Glass Cannon

tomdalling.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 86 posts

Re: Agile Is a Glass Cannon

#31

Post by carlmr »

jayd16 wrote: post #16
carlmr wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I just started and already I’ve counted up 40 person-hours of time in ‘planning’ sessions. I mean this is what always bothered me about every implementation of "agile" I've seen. Agility has a definition, planning everything in minute detail is not in any way reconcilable with that definition. Scrum is the worst at this. If you want to convince me of agile it has to be harmonious with the word definition. E.g. creat…

"Planning" meetings are also about alignment and information sharing. It's probably not about asserting dominance.

Alignment and information sharing should happen through collaboration, PR review, and PoCs. You don't need these "planning" meetings.

Re: Agile Is a Glass Cannon

#32

Post by S4mb »

I just wanna toot a horn for good old prince2 here. I know it's not the cool new thing on the bloc but I would prefer it for stuff like infrastructure or organizational change projects any day.

If you want to get an impression check out this doc about a prince2 project initiation document: https://prince2.wiki/management-products/project-initiation-...

In case it comes accross a little bit to advertisy: I am not affiliated with the prince2 publisher. Just someone who suffered through a lot of unnecessary agile, has been working in a prince2 org for two years now and really likes it.

Re: Agile Is a Glass Cannon

#33

Post by [deleted] »

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".

[deleted]

Re: Agile Is a Glass Cannon

#34

Post by Gupie »

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".

No, it says you can have processes but that individuals and interactions are more important. It does not say that you can't have processes.

Re: Agile Is a Glass Cannon

#35

Post by dragonwriter »

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…

> Agile is clearly defined in the Agile Manifesto.

Vague principles for Agile are laid out in the Manifesto, and slightly less vague in the Principles. But honestly, clear definition isn’t really something that the Agile prime movers did (the best ideas for operationalizing Agile principles, IMO, were in the Lean Software movement, but unfortunately “Agile” instead ended up getting associated – and I think the lack of operationalization of the principles in the core documents contributed to this – with rote application of one of a handful of methodologies some of the founders were associated with, which eventually settled mostly on Scrum, and then on not even Scrum-by-the-Scrum-Guide but a weird set of particular tools and things that had accreted around Scrum, each of which is useful in the right context, but they’ve become this giant consultant-reinforced cargo-cult mass of rituals divorced from their purpose in exactly the way of the ossified practices that the Agile movement was a reaction against.)

Re: Agile Is a Glass Cannon

#37

Post by dragonwriter »

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".

“X over Y” does not mean “X instead of Y”, it means “Y serves X rather than vice versa”.

That doesn’t mean no processes and tools, you need to have those. It means the processes and tools aren’t canned processes and tools imposed on the team, it means they serve the team and the way they work, are owned by the team, and that the team is free to adjust them according to its developing understanding of its needs. (And, ideally, that the team is frequently checking in and evaluating whether and how it should be changing them.)

Re: Agile Is a Glass Cannon

#38

Post by keyraycheck »

onethought wrote: post #18
keyraycheck wrote: post #10

I have a question to non-agile people? How do you work and get things done?

What do you mean by the question? Non-agile people? You mean people that don’t do scrum? Or do you want someone to step forward and say: “I’m really rigid and refuse to change direction once I start, this is how I get things done…” If you mean no scrum, simple, no card wall, tasks are epics, trust people to know what to do and let them do it. Help people when needed.

I would love to know how people work. I wonder what is the alternative.

The board is far from only agile practice and nit obligatory either. Even Epic sounds like an agile term.

Re: Agile Is a Glass Cannon

#39

Post by GoToRO »

"On the previous team, when you picked up a card it had everything you needed to do a good job. On this team, the cards are a mess."

So managers just push to implement cards that are not ready, because they are too lazy to do their job. What else is new?

Re: Agile Is a Glass Cannon

#40

Post by Gravityloss »

r_hoods_ghost wrote: post #21
pflenker wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Having fitted two kitchens, buildings are crooked... You need shimming and planning far ahead, and lots of measuring if you want to get something that is mostly straight.
Post reply on HN