Just Build It...
blog.stephaniestimac.com
Just Build It...
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Re: Just Build It...
#2"One group is instructed to submit 100 photos over the quarter and the other group is instructed to submit one perfect photo.
The group that is instructed to submit 100 photos gets better because they start right away and start taking photos and learn about composition. While the other group doesn't get better because they hem and haw over what a perfect photo is."
If true, I would want a refund if placed in the latter group.
Re: Just Build It...
#3"One group is instructed to submit 100 photos over the quarter and the other group is instructed to submit one perfect photo. The group that is instructed to submit 100 photos gets better because they start right away and start taking photos and learn about composition. While the other group doesn't get better because they hem and haw over what a perfect photo is." If true, I would want a refund if placed in the latt…
Ironically, this is also the downfall of most "agile" practicing dev teams. They've adopted scrum, they've adopted all the overhead of Jira and 2 week sprints that they never rethink, but nothing gets shipped unless it's perfect, and so nothing gets iterated on, nothing progresses, no evaluation of the work ever actually feeds back into a positive reinforcement cycle, and so you just get waterfall with much more agony.
In my last company, we were trying to ship refactors and improvements at the same time, and it inevitably broke down horribly when we'd discover some requirement that had originally never been documented or built in some component. So the scope for shipping would change from a one-to-one refactor with incremental iteration in subsequent sprints, to many cycles of QA and fixes before even minor design improvements could be shipped.
It's characteristic of every dev team I've been on that's tried to use off-the-shelf agile practices, because there's no risk tolerance at any level higher than IC. Everyone's afraid of how they'll appear, and nobody trusts anyone lower than them on the org-chart.
Re: Just Build It...
#4"One group is instructed to submit 100 photos over the quarter and the other group is instructed to submit one perfect photo. The group that is instructed to submit 100 photos gets better because they start right away and start taking photos and learn about composition. While the other group doesn't get better because they hem and haw over what a perfect photo is." If true, I would want a refund if placed in the latt…
Ironically, this is also the downfall of most "agile" practicing dev teams. They've adopted scrum, they've adopted all the overhead of Jira and 2 week sprints that they never rethink, but nothing gets shipped unless it's perfect, and so nothing gets iterated on, nothing progresses, no evaluation of the work ever actually feeds back into a positive reinforcement cycle, and so you just get waterfall with much more agon…
> nothing gets shipped unless it's perfect, and so nothing gets iterated on…
That’s why a solid, painless, quick rollback story is absolutely vital but underrated for agility. It’s not a big deal if you ship a regression but can roll back quickly. On the other hand, if every release is playing for keeps, you’ll slow down to a glacial pace to try to ship perfection. But perfection is impossible no matter how much process you put in front of it—you will ship a bug some day. So pretending like you can’t ship bugs because you have initial design reviews, multiple code reviews, sign-offs from multiple stakeholders, CI that takes 3 days to run, etc. just makes the day you do ship a big that much more painful.
Re: Just Build It...
#5"One group is instructed to submit 100 photos over the quarter and the other group is instructed to submit one perfect photo. The group that is instructed to submit 100 photos gets better because they start right away and start taking photos and learn about composition. While the other group doesn't get better because they hem and haw over what a perfect photo is." If true, I would want a refund if placed in the latt…
Is this a real variation of the myth of the ceramics teacher and the two groups? It's the same method.
Re: Just Build It...
#6"One group is instructed to submit 100 photos over the quarter and the other group is instructed to submit one perfect photo. The group that is instructed to submit 100 photos gets better because they start right away and start taking photos and learn about composition. While the other group doesn't get better because they hem and haw over what a perfect photo is." If true, I would want a refund if placed in the latt…
Ironically, this is also the downfall of most "agile" practicing dev teams. They've adopted scrum, they've adopted all the overhead of Jira and 2 week sprints that they never rethink, but nothing gets shipped unless it's perfect, and so nothing gets iterated on, nothing progresses, no evaluation of the work ever actually feeds back into a positive reinforcement cycle, and so you just get waterfall with much more agon…
> nothing gets shipped unless it's perfect, and so nothing gets iterated on
Wow that is literally the exact opposite of agile.
Like.... There is no worse descriptor for this than "agile"
Re: Just Build It...
#7Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ironically, this is also the downfall of most "agile" practicing dev teams. They've adopted scrum, they've adopted all the overhead of Jira and 2 week sprints that they never rethink, but nothing gets shipped unless it's perfect, and so nothing gets iterated on, nothing progresses, no evaluation of the work ever actually feeds back into a positive reinforcement cycle, and so you just get waterfall with much more agon…
> nothing gets shipped unless it's perfect, and so nothing gets iterated on… That’s why a solid, painless, quick rollback story is absolutely vital but underrated for agility. It’s not a big deal if you ship a regression but can roll back quickly. On the other hand, if every release is playing for keeps, you’ll slow down to a glacial pace to try to ship perfection. But perfection is impossible no matter how much proc…
The issue is that big messes can be made that are hard to clean up in one small release.
For example, one of our teams had the requirement "Allow end users to programmatically configure widget xyz". Now, widget xyz has a janky design and a table with 50 columns associated with it.
So what did this team do? They took that internal table definition, made a CRUD api that exposes the whole thing, and moved on.
Tell me, how do you fix something like that like that? They followed the agile route, got an MVP out with hardly any effort on their part. But now we have this API that shows off 20 years of legacy that our end users now depend on.
And to be clear, of those 50 fields, maybe 3 of them mattered to the end user and the rest could have been inferred. But doing that inference is a lot more work as it takes understanding the domain.
Re: Just Build It...
#8Earlier quoted context omitted.
> nothing gets shipped unless it's perfect, and so nothing gets iterated on… That’s why a solid, painless, quick rollback story is absolutely vital but underrated for agility. It’s not a big deal if you ship a regression but can roll back quickly. On the other hand, if every release is playing for keeps, you’ll slow down to a glacial pace to try to ship perfection. But perfection is impossible no matter how much proc…
The issue is that big messes can be made that are hard to clean up in one small release. For example, one of our teams had the requirement "Allow end users to programmatically configure widget xyz". Now, widget xyz has a janky design and a table with 50 columns associated with it. So what did this team do? They took that internal table definition, made a CRUD api that exposes the whole thing, and moved on. Tell me, h…
Well I suppose that's the difference between thoughtful systems and process and zero systems and process, and also poor problem definition. There is some nuance between "ship literally anything to end users" and "ship an improvement" or something else to end users, or to a beta that roles out to end users and isolates the possible regression to a smaller surface area. It also seems like those developers might either suck (possible, but uncharitable), or that the system rewards the wrong things.
But much of the time, better or worse laters of bureaucracy in the system come about from these mistakes which will eventually happen, so it's a very valid point, and I do think a lot of the time it's companies building up scar tissue and not being capable of getting the necessary surgery to fix it.
Re: Just Build It...
#9Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ironically, this is also the downfall of most "agile" practicing dev teams. They've adopted scrum, they've adopted all the overhead of Jira and 2 week sprints that they never rethink, but nothing gets shipped unless it's perfect, and so nothing gets iterated on, nothing progresses, no evaluation of the work ever actually feeds back into a positive reinforcement cycle, and so you just get waterfall with much more agon…
> nothing gets shipped unless it's perfect, and so nothing gets iterated on Wow that is literally the exact opposite of agile. Like.... There is no worse descriptor for this than "agile"
I might have read it wrong, but I read OP as saying something like "people want to do agile, but wait until the project is perfect, thereby negating the whole point".
Re: Just Build It...
#10"One group is instructed to submit 100 photos over the quarter and the other group is instructed to submit one perfect photo. The group that is instructed to submit 100 photos gets better because they start right away and start taking photos and learn about composition. While the other group doesn't get better because they hem and haw over what a perfect photo is." If true, I would want a refund if placed in the latt…
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