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This is likely the number one reason for rejecting agile: it has already failed. I've worked at over a dozen places claiming to do agile and have found exactly
by joesmo 11y ago
This is likely the number one reason for rejecting agile: it has already failed. I've worked at over a dozen places claiming to do agile and have found exactly zero that actually do. What's worse, the process degrades into 30-60 minute "stand-ups" or "scrums" or whatever, eating into a good chunk of the day for absolutely negative gain (as it's mostly people talking about shit that's irrelevant to 90% of the team and wasting everyone's time because the "process" says they should). I've also seen it degrade into another reason for management to enforce deadlines in all places, including places that only employ deadlines when development is really behind schedule (as is all software development I've ever seen in the business world).
And what are the advantages? Little Joe over there in the corner can feel brave enough to speak up about his problem once a day? Seriously? Is this a process for the socially inept? Is that what we're trying to solve here? Disrupting the coding flow? Allowing the manager to be even more lazy in his contact with the team by limiting it to a few minutes a day (closer to 30 than 5)? Having it replace those couple of hours you could have spent designing your app with a few months of 16 hour bug-tracking right before release? Oh, please ... I think it's time to acknowledge the process doesn't work, that anyone can come up with hundreds of points showing why it doesn't, and that it's time to ditch this resource-wasting process altogether.
- gregmac 11y ago> I've worked at over a dozen places claiming to do agile and have found exactly zero that actually do. > I think it's time to acknowledge the process doesn't work Sure, if you don't actually do it, it doesn't work. For example, you could say: "I've worked at over a dozen places claiming to be linux shops, but they don't have linux installed anywhere. I think it's time to acknowledge linux doesn't work." Does this mean that agile itself is bad? No, it can and does work. It's just much harder to do correctly than it seems (eg: it takes more than reading a book, putting a Kanban board up, and having a daily "standup" meeting).
- joesmo 11y agoHere's a new methodology I invented (that's about as useful as agile): perfection. Do everything perfectly. However, no one has managed to implement this amazing new methodology in a way that works yet. It's so simple. So many have tried and failed. Surely it's not the perfection methodology that's at fault because that's perfect. It must be the idiots trying to implement it, who haven't actually implemented perfection, that are failing to implement perfection. If only they could implement perfection, they'd see how perfect perfection is! But I don't see perfection anywhere! WTF?
- dragonwriter 11y ago> I've worked at over a dozen places claiming to do agile and have found exactly zero that actually do. Agile is, if it is anything, a set of values for selecting what you do, not a set of things you do. And a weakness in the Agile literature is that there is a lot that talks about things you could do (and a lot of it conflicts), but there is a lot less about how you make the values of the Agile manifesto concrete in selecting and adapting what you do (while its not specifically "Agile", there's a lot written on this that is applicable in an Agile context in the Lean methods literature -- Lean and Agile are directed at largely similar values, but Lean has stronger roots in process engineering and seems to have more focus on understanding why things work and how you know that they work.)
- joesmo 11y agoI agree. So I'll add that none of those places had any values aligned with agile at all, despite spending time, money, and effort on agile. Maybe that's because values don't come from processes and trying to implement a process to instill values into people is patently absurd.