Seven Things I Hate About Agile • Hacker News Board

Re: Seven Things I Hate About Agile

#31

Post by njharman » Wed, Aug 22, 2012, 3:56 PM UTC

pacala wrote: post #17

The thing that doesn't work for me in Agile: being treated like a baby and spoon fed little bits of work with little room for responsibility, initiative, creativity and a personal touch. Agile is great if you are a mediocre manager and you want to run a place full of replaceable cogs, but not so great if you want a place that pushes the boundaries and consistently goes the extra mile

You describe the opposite of Agile. Agile is all about ownership, responsibility, self-direction. It, (at least scrum) gives way more control to "producers" (devs, designers, etc) than "managers".

But, of course (almost) no one does scrum cause sales/customers want up front signed contract listing exactly what will be done and exactly when.

Re: Seven Things I Hate About Agile

#32

Post by bjourne » Wed, Aug 22, 2012, 3:56 PM UTC

Anyone care to explain what the author mean by: "Pair programming is like those girls that go to the restaurant bathroom together."? It sounds like a funny analogy but it's just pure gibberish. The point of the article seem to be to get reactions, not tell you anything about Agile.

Re: Seven Things I Hate About Agile

#33

Post by jschuur » Wed, Aug 22, 2012, 3:57 PM UTC

pacala wrote: post #17

The thing that doesn't work for me in Agile: being treated like a baby and spoon fed little bits of work with little room for responsibility, initiative, creativity and a personal touch. Agile is great if you are a mediocre manager and you want to run a place full of replaceable cogs, but not so great if you want a place that pushes the boundaries and consistently goes the extra mile

To a certain extent, agile tries to narrow the scope of a sprint, in order to ship more rapidly. For people that have a grander vision of what they want to build this may seem narrowing to constantly be reminded of the MVP. If the product you're creating is a commercial thing, or just something that will thrive based on its adoption in the marketplace, feature creep can be damaging, and it's helpful to have someone keep you focused on making that next shippable version.

That's inevitably going to piss some people off who are bubbling with ideas and want to implement them all. As a product manager with an active imagination, I've been in that situation, and I'm slowly recovering :)

Re: Seven Things I Hate About Agile

#34

Post by ChristianMarks » Wed, Aug 22, 2012, 4:00 PM UTC

asinglenet wrote: post #11

ionforce wrote: post #2

I like how the opening point is ageism. Really classy.

Author here - I can make an observation about old people because I myself am 49 years old. I'm not making a value judgement about older people. That would be ageism. I'm observing that the attendees "agile" events tend to be older than most programmers, and even most IT staff. That's just demographics. Why is that? That affects a lot of things.

You are either a hypocrite or cannot remember your own writing. "The smell of death" permeates agile gatherings, because the attendees are largely over 50. That's not a statement of fact. It might have been a factual statement, had you written that the attendees were animated, rotting corpses.

Re: Seven Things I Hate About Agile

#35

Post by ndemoor » Wed, Aug 22, 2012, 4:00 PM UTC

I genuinely agree. In a former life I was promoted from software developer to lead dev/scrum master, and I can tell you the dev part of the job moved completely to the background, making room for something more of a secretary job: planning poker roundups, doing the scrum board task dance, doing the numbers game on estimated and effective man-hours, etc. Overhead.

I don't say agile development is a bad thing. But some managers tend to be led by cool buzz words and obey the manifesto way to strictly.

Agile development is different for every team and situation, not a one-stop-shop everyone should adhere to.

Re: Seven Things I Hate About Agile

#36

Post by igouy » Wed, Aug 22, 2012, 4:00 PM UTC

DanielBMarkham wrote: post #12

I usually vote up Agile attacks, because I love to hear developers talk about the difference between good and bad Agile. But it's getting a little old. It seems the world is full of cranky, half-informed folks who get a little coffee in them and suddenly are ready to make grand pronouncements about the entire state of things (Love the self-recursion here) Seriously, one last time. Agile is best practices around itera…

>>What's good ice cream? Any damn thing you'd like it to be.Therefore -- What's Agile? Any damn thing you'd like it to be.

Re: Seven Things I Hate About Agile

#37

Post by pwan » Wed, Aug 22, 2012, 4:03 PM UTC

jaimzob wrote: post #13

I'm not a big fan of agile either but "over 40" == "the smell of death"? Seriously? Not a convincing, or classy, opening line. And this was posted by the CEO of Assembla.

It's not death, it's 2-Nonenal

Re: Seven Things I Hate About Agile

#38

Post by drumdance » Wed, Aug 22, 2012, 4:05 PM UTC

igouy wrote: post #36

DanielBMarkham wrote: post #12

I usually vote up Agile attacks, because I love to hear developers talk about the difference between good and bad Agile. But it's getting a little old. It seems the world is full of cranky, half-informed folks who get a little coffee in them and suddenly are ready to make grand pronouncements about the entire state of things (Love the self-recursion here) Seriously, one last time. Agile is best practices around itera…

>>What's good ice cream? Any damn thing you'd like it to be. Therefore -- What's Agile? Any damn thing you'd like it to be.

Eh, maybe. You could not offer "good ice cream" for sale and instead deliver cookies.

Re: Seven Things I Hate About Agile

#39

Post by vital_sol » Wed, Aug 22, 2012, 4:07 PM UTC

Oh yeah, I remember all those Morning Stand-Up Comedy Meetings at Salesforce.

Re: Seven Things I Hate About Agile

#40

Post by USNetizen » Wed, Aug 22, 2012, 4:08 PM UTC

Statistically speaking, the "young" startup founder is a complete stereotype. The over-50 crowd which this article refers to as "having the stench of death" actually starts and runs more successful startups than the under-30 crowd. So, to be fair, those "hot" startups you love, that have a business plan worth more than just "build it and they will come" in it, are most likely run by someone over 40.

Also, anyone that knocks "Agile" has not had much experience in the enterprise sector. Yes, it has overhead - but in a larger (500+ employees) company that overhead is absolutely crucial to maintaining uniformity amongst all divisions and ensuring all "players" in the game are on the same page.