Even with Agile and Scrum waterfall will sneak in • Hacker News Board

Re: Even with Agile and Scrum waterfall will sneak in

#311

Post by dwenzek » Tue, Dec 07, 2021, 5:45 PM UTC

I see as the key point of this post the following point:

> I believe we urgently need a new process for working remote.

I do believe the same. Working remotely forces agile processes to be adjusted. Information radiators are no more the same. I can no more notice that 3 guys are arguing since an hour in their corner. I can no more notice that 1 guy is struggling alone with his compiler. It's more difficult to agree on a design on the whiteboard. The pace of our days has changed too, with more strict alternation between meetings and individual activities.

We need other channels, more written communication, and a bit more of planning. In no case a whole up-front plan. Definitely not. But the minimum of planning that will help to cope with the distance and the changed pace.

Re: Even with Agile and Scrum waterfall will sneak in

#312

Post by Pokepokalypse » Wed, Dec 08, 2021, 12:09 AM UTC

rawgabbit wrote: post #268

xondono wrote: post #9

To this day I still don’t understand how one can read the agile manifesto and somehow get to scrum. The whole thing is about processes, and tools (jira)… the complete opposite. The reason everyone ends up doing waterfall is that it’s not the devs who you need to convince when selling agility, is the chain of command. Being agile means having no long term plan. If the C-suite can’t handle that, you’ll never be agile.

>>> "Being agile means having no long term plan." I believe the angst against agile is it doesn't have a definitive viewpoint but is a reaction against what it sees as the evils of waterfall. Without definite processes, we get scrum. From my viewpoint, the issue is that scrum has a flawed understanding of Toyota Kaizen which it based itself on. Yes, in a Toyota factory, team members are expected to be able to perform…

Dammit! so all this Kaizen training my employer paid for me to take 20 years ago, is actually Scrum?

Re: Even with Agile and Scrum waterfall will sneak in

#313

Post by rawgabbit » Wed, Dec 08, 2021, 6:03 PM UTC

Pokepokalypse wrote: post #312

rawgabbit wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>> "Being agile means having no long term plan." I believe the angst against agile is it doesn't have a definitive viewpoint but is a reaction against what it sees as the evils of waterfall. Without definite processes, we get scrum. From my viewpoint, the issue is that scrum has a flawed understanding of Toyota Kaizen which it based itself on. Yes, in a Toyota factory, team members are expected to be able to perform…

Dammit! so all this Kaizen training my employer paid for me to take 20 years ago, is actually Scrum?

Scrum is the bastardization of Kaizen and Agile.

Re: Even with Agile and Scrum waterfall will sneak in

#314

Post by bastardoperator » Wed, Dec 08, 2021, 10:53 PM UTC

regularfry wrote: post #241

spookthesunset wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know if I agree with that. Rather than have every team on earth invent their own process from first principles, they provide adequate starting points on which to grow. Agile, Scrum and Kanban aren't perfect but they can get a team started. Good teams will take them as templates and tweak as needed.

If you look at Kanban specifically, you can tell if it's been implemented well because it's not just affecting the team. It's a tool to improve the entire value stream.

Even that is a bastardized version when compared to what Toyota developed. The reality is software engineers are not factory production line workers. Also, kanban negates the fact that cars are completely spec'd out (aka waterfall) by the time a car is ready to be built on a production line.

Re: Even with Agile and Scrum waterfall will sneak in

#315

Post by regularfry » Thu, Dec 09, 2021, 12:22 PM UTC

bastardoperator wrote: post #314

regularfry wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you look at Kanban specifically, you can tell if it's been implemented well because it's not just affecting the team. It's a tool to improve the entire value stream.

Even that is a bastardized version when compared to what Toyota developed. The reality is software engineers are not factory production line workers. Also, kanban negates the fact that cars are completely spec'd out (aka waterfall) by the time a car is ready to be built on a production line.

Yes, and a vast amount of the design detail that goes into car design is to make building it easier.

You're right that software engineers aren't factory production line workers, but I'm not sure it actually matters. The only detail I can see relevant to whether kanban can work in is the distribution of how long each piece of work takes, and while you'd expect the distributions to be different between "bolt lump A onto tab B" and "add feature X to website Y", I don't think they'd be different enough to completely break the queueing model. I'm not sure that it matters that each piece of work through the team is unique versus the completely repeatable part assembly stereotype of factory work.

The main issue I see with kanban as a software development idiom is that in every place I've worked, supply cannot be effectively constrained, except artificially, at the gate into the team. There is always more work to do than time to do it in. Now part of that is a cultural problem to do with politics and the place of the CIO (or equivalent) in a typical company, but it definitely feels like kanban needs to be driven from outside the tech org to work well.

Re: Even with Agile and Scrum waterfall will sneak in

#316

Post by moksly » Thu, Dec 09, 2021, 11:20 PM UTC

baobabKoodaa wrote: post #307

moksly wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which companies? I’ve never seen anyone willing to do that in decades of contracting. Maybe it’s just different here in Denmark, but people never buy things here without knowing what they buy.

I'm not at liberty to disclose company names, but I live in Finland and I can tell you it's normal here. It's basically equivalent to "renting" workers. I would be willing to bet that "rent-a-worker" industry exists in Denmark as well, and that it also includes IT work.

But rent a worker is small scale. It is not signing a multi million euro contract.

Consultants are a thing here, and they may be the closest companies get to not knowing what they buy.

I mean, I’m not saying that the other way works. All our major IT systems are delayed and over budget, but there are detailed and outlined requirements that aren’t delivered.

Re: Even with Agile and Scrum waterfall will sneak in

#317

Post by friendzis » Fri, Dec 10, 2021, 11:57 AM UTC

xondono wrote: post #9

To this day I still don’t understand how one can read the agile manifesto and somehow get to scrum. The whole thing is about processes, and tools (jira)… the complete opposite. The reason everyone ends up doing waterfall is that it’s not the devs who you need to convince when selling agility, is the chain of command. Being agile means having no long term plan. If the C-suite can’t handle that, you’ll never be agile.

Scrum tries to sell a set tools, while the originals (Toyota manufacturing system) were methodologies, a set of processes to build those tools. Scrum is a different abstraction layer

Re: Even with Agile and Scrum waterfall will sneak in

#318

Post by friendzis » Fri, Dec 10, 2021, 12:01 PM UTC

Well, if you look closely Scrum is a waterfall system. "Classical" waterfall just works on larger chunks - releases or even whole projects. Scrum focuses on "sprints" - small chunks of functionality - but still applies tiered, waterfall approach: you start a sprint with planning, move to development, run quality controls and deploy.

You should see waterfalls in your Scrum. The only question is whether the chunk size you apply the waterfall on is appropriate

Re: Even with Agile and Scrum waterfall will sneak in

#319

Post by baobabKoodaa » Fri, Dec 10, 2021, 3:02 PM UTC

moksly wrote: post #316

baobabKoodaa wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not at liberty to disclose company names, but I live in Finland and I can tell you it's normal here. It's basically equivalent to "renting" workers. I would be willing to bet that "rent-a-worker" industry exists in Denmark as well, and that it also includes IT work.

But rent a worker is small scale. It is not signing a multi million euro contract. Consultants are a thing here, and they may be the closest companies get to not knowing what they buy. I mean, I’m not saying that the other way works. All our major IT systems are delayed and over budget, but there are detailed and outlined requirements that aren’t delivered.

I've seen deals where a company sells a pack of consultants to a multi-year project with a price tag of over 1M euros. I don't know if this happens when the scale is 10M+, but it does happen at 1M scale.