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

Agile sucks for software development and I’m tired of pretending it doesn’t

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 93 posts

Re: Agile sucks for software development and I’m tired of pretending it doesn’t

#61

Post by throwuwu »

spamizbad wrote: post #55

Yeah it does suck and you’re not wrong. I’ve spent the last 3 years at my company trying to refine our Agile/Scrum process into something that gets out of my engineers way. It basically boils down to the Engineering manager, product manager and project manager or “scrum master” actually putting in a good bit of work to make things run smoothly. 1) keep your stands below 15 minutes. Always. There should also never be…

This sounds nice. Can you recommend any materials I can forward to my (inexperienced)PM?

Re: Agile sucks for software development and I’m tired of pretending it doesn’t

#63

Post by a1445c8b »

perrygeo wrote: post #42

That's a lot to unpack. But I agree with your general sentiment - As currently practiced, Agile generally involves a lot of ceremony before actually building, with many rounds of collaborative planning and risk management on every decision. It's morphed into something completely different than the original definition... We have come to value: Individuals and interactions over processes and tools. Working software ove…

I believe we’ve moved on from that: https://www.halfarsedagilemanifesto.org/

Re: Agile sucks for software development and I’m tired of pretending it doesn’t

#65

Post by boxed »

Read the manifesto I say. If it seems bad and you aren't making changes then it's by definition not agile.

I worked 10 years in a shop where I could quite literally do zero minutes of meetings per week if I so chose. Which I did from time to time. But the morning meeting was very short and a good time to just say hello to people so I often went.

Re: Agile sucks for software development and I’m tired of pretending it doesn’t

#67

Post by eschaton »

Four out of every eight hours a day in process-related meetings doesn’t sound very agile to me.

I’ve done plenty of actually-agile development and it’s always involved one meeting at the start of an iteration to select the items to work on from the backlog, a daily 15-minute standup to address any blockers for our immediate work, and then a couple hours at the end of the iteration to demo the completed work and do a retrospective for anything unexpected that came up.

That’s always worked great for me, especially combined with sizing work items in points rather than time so estimates come out of measurement of previous work rather than guesses about how long things will take.

Re: Agile sucks for software development and I’m tired of pretending it doesn’t

#68

Post by archsurface »

Correct. It's so that non-technical and negligibly technical managers can manage junior devs, including 40 year old ex-lawyers with two years of scripting, and boot campers. For the experienced it's a disaster of childishness, obstacles and frustrations.

Re: Agile sucks for software development and I’m tired of pretending it doesn’t

#69

Post by readthenotes1 »

reilly3000 wrote: post #47

I don’t really know anything other than Distraction Driven Development. Between being waterboarded with Slack, email, and noise on both about everything else, and walls of all team meetings… only the loudest, quickest, and shiniest things get done. The carefully groomed backlog is irrelevant in a crisis, and in the realm of devops it seems that’s the norm. I’m certain that I am part of that problem. My neurotype seek…

Tbh, i stopped reading and upvoted you after "waterboarded with Slack"

Re: Agile sucks for software development and I’m tired of pretending it doesn’t

#70

Post by g9yuayon »

> My current company spends 4 out of 8 hours every day in meetings.

When I was in Netflix and Uber, my teams had no status meeting, at all. We came up with a context and a big enough ownership, and just let the team loose. It's something like this: we need to enable services to send their events for analytics without ever talking to the data lake team. Steven, how about you own it? Then, a month or two later, everyone in the company can simply use log4j (at that time) to log an instance of annotated Java class, and in 15 minutes or less, the logged events became available for all kinds of queries in the data lake in the right format with the right metadata. No status meeting. No alignment meeting. No customer outreach. Not unnecessary shit. Things just happened, features just introduced. It's all non-event.

In the end, it is the culture that matters. Everything else is a matter of tactics.

Post reply on HN