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Agile Is a Tainted Term

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Re: Agile Is a Tainted Term

#41

Post by foofie »

i_have_an_idea wrote: post #8

Agile/Scrum is one of those things that are impossible to criticize. You can come up with a well-reasoned critique of Agile and there's always some Agile evangelist that pops up to tell you that you're not doing "real agile" and, therefore, your experience is invalid. At the same time, I have now done software engineering for over a decade, in many roles and teams, and I have never seen Agile or Scrum to lead to the…

> You can come up with a well-reasoned critique of Agile and there's always some Agile evangelist that pops up to tell you that you're not doing "real agile" and, therefore, your experience is invalid.

What I've seen the most is people putting up straw men in place of Agile, and proceed to attack the strawman in spite of being repeatedly pointed out they are pummelling a straw man.

Re: Agile Is a Tainted Term

#43

Post by Tabular-Iceberg »

oneshtein wrote: post #40
Tabular-Iceberg wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it really vaguely defined? I find it perfectly precise in what it tells you what you need to optimize for. It just doesn't tell you how because it couldn't possibly know. But finding out is hard work. What the fraudsters are telling you is that you don't need to do any of the things in the manifesto because they know everything already. A general lack of industriousness on the part of software companies is really…

A customer of the software product need to know that after spending of $X dollars for Y days he will receive Z. In a working Agile project, PM must calculate team velocity and then use it to predict arrival time and expenses, then add/remove developers or features to meet budget and/or dead line. Agile manifesto says nothing about that.

Well, they think they need that. What they really need is accomplish some business goal.

The Agile manifesto doesn't say anything about the former because it would defeat its own purpose.

Re: Agile Is a Tainted Term

#44

Post by SideburnsOfDoom »

misnome wrote: post #36
SideburnsOfDoom wrote: post #9

Yes. What I have said before, for the same reasons, is that when the average office that says "we do the Agile", what they mean is that they have top-down, upfront planned micromanagement via tools such as Jira. * This has nothing in common with the values of the Agile Manifesto. In fact it's more like the opposite of them. * I hate Jira. Jira is not the cause of the problem. People's desire for a tool like that is c…

We’re going to be officially moving to Agile! Soon. By which I mean the project planning committee has created a multi-hundred page document with precise BPM-style workflow charts (based on Jira, obviously), and non-technical managers have started being sent on multi-day training courses to learn how to follow them. It’s going to be a shitshow!

> the project planning committee has created a multi-hundred page document with precise workflow charts ... It’s going to be a shitshow!

A Waterfall of effluent, spilling from the end of the process pipe, branded "Agile!" (TM, sponsored by Atlassian).

What are you moving from ?

Re: Agile Is a Tainted Term

#45

Post by viraptor »

PradeetPatel wrote: post #15
midasz wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you use that does lead to a good piece of software?

Having clear requirements, good communications with key stakeholders and empower the enginees.

That sounds familiar... Oh ! That's where agile ideas come from! http://www.extremeprogramming.org/

Re: Agile Is a Tainted Term

#46

Post by sime2009 »

The rarely discussed cornerstone of Agile is trusting the team and letting them organise themselves. For most organisation this represents a huge internal change in power structure.

The Agile industrial complex can't really sell a message to their customers (i.e. managers) that the development teams should have the power and run themselves how they feel fit. This message amounts to "if this works, we can fire the managers". Not a popular message for managers.

So, instead of building on an agile foundation, companies just add some story points and funny sounding meetings on top of the old structure and nothing really changes. It is Agile cosplay.

Re: Agile Is a Tainted Term

#47

Post by pydry »

Tabular-Iceberg wrote: post #34
pydry wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing that made agile ripe for fraudsters/cargo cultists was how vaguely it was defined. That can be fixed by defining something new, more precisely.

Is it really vaguely defined? I find it perfectly precise in what it tells you what you need to optimize for. It just doesn't tell you how because it couldn't possibly know. But finding out is hard work. What the fraudsters are telling you is that you don't need to do any of the things in the manifesto because they know everything already. A general lack of industriousness on the part of software companies is really…

>Is it really vaguely defined?

https://agilemanifesto.org/ does this look like a clear and precise proscription for a good way to engineer software? Or does it look more like a bunch of "inspiring quotes" from a discount southern baptist church website from the 1990s?

I learned this the hard way when I was younger when I tried to write some tests for some bugs and my boss told me that we needed to deal with it with meetings instead. People over process he said. I actually couldn't argue with that.

Re: Agile Is a Tainted Term

#48

Post by saiya-jin »

midasz wrote: post #20
PradeetPatel wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having clear requirements, good communications with key stakeholders and empower the enginees.

What if the requirements are super clear but they change? When do you find out and what happens then? I've personally never had a project where the requirements were 100% clear and stayed exactly the same. Even when writing a v2 of an existing project from the ground up things tended to be unclear and subject to change.

Well then requirements were not 'super clear', they were simply incorrect and it doesn't matter in which way. A very bad start of any project, since beginning you are already putting out flames left and right

Re: Agile Is a Tainted Term

#49

Post by pitched »

sime2009 wrote: post #46

The rarely discussed cornerstone of Agile is trusting the team and letting them organise themselves. For most organisation this represents a huge internal change in power structure. The Agile industrial complex can't really sell a message to their customers (i.e. managers) that the development teams should have the power and run themselves how they feel fit. This message amounts to "if this works, we can fire the man…

I’ll take this a step further too and say that if Agile is being introduced by management, it means they don’t trust their teams to organize themselves. Agile, as sold, can’t actually work in that environment. The battle is already lost.

Re: Agile Is a Tainted Term

#50

Post by viraptor »

benbruscella wrote: post #42

http://programming-motherfucker.com/

I wish that was a joke, but it's Zed so... No, you can't replace customer collaboration with more programming. When you're in a programming hole of misunderstood solutions, you can't fix that by doing more programming. When things keep changing without good reasons, you can't fix that by doing more programming, etc.
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