Coconut Headphones: Why Agile Has Failed
mikehadlow.blogspot.co.uk
Coconut Headphones: Why Agile Has Failed
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Re: Coconut Headphones: Why Agile Has Failed
#2Has it really failed? It seems like at least some of the principles of agile are just a given now. 10-15 years ago that wasn't the case. People actually believed in waterfall.
Of course many individual teams fail at agile but those teams would probably fail no matter what approach they were using.
Re: Coconut Headphones: Why Agile Has Failed
#3Heh... Totally love the "We'll ask for estimates and treat them as deadlines" meme. I think that captures the essence of the article.
The problem is usually caused by management - the technical team has to hold strong and push back on forces from above.
Since the person above them is usually trying to cover their own rear-end, the tech team needs to learn how to give sounds bites to their manager. That manager takes the sound bite and replays it higher up. Win-win.
Re: Coconut Headphones: Why Agile Has Failed
#4I worked for a large corporation which used a hard core water fall method to produce software. And yet it called it Agile. Why? Because why not.
Re: Coconut Headphones: Why Agile Has Failed
#5I'm stuck trying to finish a project as a vendor. The original team in charge of selling the project has put a guy as Project Manager that takes pride everytime he says: "As you know, I'm not a technical guy" just before explaining something completely wrong from the technical standpoint, or agreeing into something that can't be delivered as explained. I can't agree more on the quote that says "Please don’t put non-technical managers in charge of software developers." I just hope finishing this without a lose, and getting a better position for the following projects.
Re: Coconut Headphones: Why Agile Has Failed
#6The demotivation poster (we'll ask for estimates, but then treat them as deadlines) really strikes a chord because that is one of my major 'gripes' with the agile planning process. Particularly when a manager is heavily involved in that process. It may be no coincidence that the best projects I have been on are the ones where the manager deliberately stepped out of the room or was not a part of those phases of the planning process.
Agile is part of a more disturbing trend I've noticed [0] of companies striving very hard to turn software into a literal sausage-making factory [1] and to make software engineers just another cog in the machine or a replaceable part to fatten the bottom line with a lower salary. This is provably the aim of some of the top companies given news on no-hire agreements. [10].
[0] with Java being the favored "currency" of programming languages being the other disturbing trend-- it's much easier to replace a Java programmer than any other for a reason
[1] you know what they say about how sausages are made
[10] http://gizmodo.com/apple-guilty-of-price-fixing-730018979
Re: Coconut Headphones: Why Agile Has Failed
#7As somebody who has been involved in the Agile movement since before the term existed (I was using Extreme Programming in 2000 or 2001), I agree 100% with this.
I definitely think the consultants get a good chunk of the blame. But as I explain in detail elsewhere [1], I think that happened because executives, the consultants' customers, were mainly interested in buying BS. Not consciously, but when they were offered a choice between hard Agile and easy Agile, they bought easy Agile.
It's sad, because in the 2001-2005 timeframe, there were a lot of great people doing a lot of great stuff. There are still some doing great stuff today. But yeah, among most of the people I talk to that are "doing Agile" (as if there were such a thing), Agile is just putting new labels on the same old power dynamics.
And it's those power dynamics that are the problem, and no matter what methods you supposedly adopt, unless you change those, the system will return to making powerful executives and managers feel safe and in control. At the expense of productivity, quality, value delivery, and a whole lot else.
[1] http://agilefocus.com/2011/02/21/agiles-second-chasm-and-how...
Re: Coconut Headphones: Why Agile Has Failed
#8The demotivation poster (we'll ask for estimates, but then treat them as deadlines) really strikes a chord because that is one of my major 'gripes' with the agile planning process. Particularly when a manager is heavily involved in that process. It may be no coincidence that the best projects I have been on are the ones where the manager deliberately stepped out of the room or was not a part of those phases of the pl…
Yeah. 100% agreed.
In some ways I don't blame people. Industrial approaches to organizing people provided a major leap forward for humankind. And they work well with primate power dynamics; modern corporate structures are basically feudalism in suits. It's natural that people would just want to take the top-down, command-and-control structures and replicate them in the new thing they're doing.
But they just don't work well. They don't even work well for industry anymore; there's a reason that Toyota, which has a very different management philosophy, wiped the floor with the US auto companies, which stayed stuck in the early 20th century.
To be fair, Agile started out to be 100% the opposite of that sausage-factory approach. I know a lot of the early players, and they sincerely had a very different vision. It makes me sad to see their work used as just another stick to beat developers. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
Re: Coconut Headphones: Why Agile Has Failed
#9I'm stuck trying to finish a project as a vendor. The original team in charge of selling the project has put a guy as Project Manager that takes pride everytime he says: "As you know, I'm not a technical guy" just before explaining something completely wrong from the technical standpoint, or agreeing into something that can't be delivered as explained. I can't agree more on the quote that says "Please don’t put non-t…
I think the problem isn't with who you put in charge. I think the problem is the notion of "in charge".
One of the best things for me about teams that were working well is that everybody was in charge. Everybody felt responsible for the outcome. Everybody cared. Everybody knew they could make things happen, and that differences of view were resolved through collaboration and experimentation, not power.
You can see that explicitly in the structure of Extreme Programming, a major Agile process. There were developers and there was a product manager (called "customer"), and neither controlled the other. Indeed, people created an XP bill of rights that described the balance of powers:
http://agile.dzone.com/articles/worth-repeating-xp-bills
You can see that working in the large at places like Spotify, where teams are cross-functional. People do have managers, but they aren't on the same team, and technical people report to technical managers, not generic businesspeople. Those managers aren't "in charge" in the typical sense. They mentor and support the people working directly on teams. They only really manage when things go wrong.
And I think that's what the Agile community was going for early on. It's a shame that fell by the wayside.
Re: Coconut Headphones: Why Agile Has Failed
#10Has it really failed? It seems like at least some of the principles of agile are just a given now. 10-15 years ago that wasn't the case. People actually believed in waterfall. Of course many individual teams fail at agile but those teams would probably fail no matter what approach they were using.
It's a good question. But personally, I think that people would have stopped believing in waterfall approaches anyhow. Anybody sticking with 18-month release cycles today would seem like an idiot whether or not anybody had heard of Agile. And really, what a lot of supposed Agile teams are doing is really mini-waterfall: all the ceremony, shorter cycles, but just as much horseshit and self-delusion.