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I've been at a few studios, all expounding how they're "Agile! Scrum! Fast-Moving!" And I've seen true "agile" horror shows. Stand-ups consisting of everyone e

I've been at a few studios, all expounding how they're "Agile! Scrum! Fast-Moving!" And I've seen true "agile" horror shows. Stand-ups consisting of everyone either A) trying to prove they actually did work yesterday in as many words as possible or B) taking this as a chance to have a nice chat with everyone. Hour-long daily stand-ups are not agile. The worst though was the planning meeting for next sprint, where no one had a #$%^ing clue what they needed to do, what the priority was, where the dependencies lay. A day every two weeks you dread. I think the big take-away is not to do Agile for Agile's sake. Do it to solve a problem- if developers don't know what each-other is doing, there's solutions. Working on a product with changing requirements? Work in sprints to be able to respond to that. But don't do it because it's what all the cool kids are doing. EDIT: The inverse is also true, people. It's not supposed to be a religion, you can pick and choose practices and processes to fit your requirements. Do what you need to do to achieve the goals you want to achieve.

kuschku 11y ago
At the university where I am, we were discussing today in one compsci class how agile is something that only works if you don’t care about consistent quality and only care about always having the newest, shiniest, greatest. And how, if you are working on software for ESA, or working for one of the largest internet retailers, or if you’re writing a control software for railway switches, waterfall is the only possible option. Even if the target is moving, agile is never able to provide quality. Some of my professors were hired before by large internet retailers to spend weeks trying to understand even their business processes, as the retailer had built their infrastructure without oversight and every employee was working on whatever they wanted. Just this "trying to understand what even is going on" helped them improve their processes and greatly increase their profit margin, as they were able to make many things more efficient with rethinking and rewriting. EDIT: I’ll add my definition of quality here: Your software is able to interact with third parties without them ever having to rewrite their software, your software can run for decades without or with little maintenance, and your software is well documented. In my opinion, Agile is very ill suited for these requirements. One example is the Internet of Things, where you can be sure no one is ever going to update their smart washing machine
- sopooneo 11y ago
  Why? What that is written in the Agile Manifesto precludes quality?
  - kuschku 11y ago
    > Responding to change over following a plan Which, in reality, leads to everyone working on random things, just adding features and somehow patching bugs. But often refactoring the system, rewriting subsystems, etc is necessary. > Working software over comprehensive documentation If your software is working, but there is no documentation, this might work well for a website, but as soon as you go into control systems for the heating of the ISS, or go into railway control systems, or systems that measure the optimum way of packaging a package at an internet retailer, documentation is everything. ---------------- The agile manifesto works kinda, but, to quote a professor, especially the "as long as it works, we don’t need to know what we are doing or have documentation, leads to you carrying all that technical debt around with you all the time". One of the largest european internet retailers fixed their code quality problems by forcing teams to release all code shared between two teams to be released under Apache License on GitHub. Suddenly developers started caring about code quality, reusability, and maintainability.
    - matthewmacleod 11y ago
      Which, in reality, leads to everyone working on random things, just adding features and somehow patching bugs. No, it doesn't. Bad management and process leads to that. But often refactoring the system, rewriting subsystems, etc is necessary. Totally acceptable and something that can easily be included in agile development. If your software is working, but there is no documentation This is not a prerequisite of agile development.
      - kuschku 11y ago
        > > If your software is working, but there is no documentation > This is not a prerequisite of agile development. No, but agile says that software is still quality software, even when documentation doesn’t work. http://www.agilemanifesto.org/ http://www.agilemanifesto.org/ It’s pretty clearly written down.
darkxanthos 11y ago
This. It is so important to separate the practices associated with Agile apart from Agile. One practice I use a ton is retrospectives and really it's useful just as a way of codifying how much and how to experiment with and change team process.

kuschku 11y ago

At the university where I am, we were discussing today in one compsci class how agile is something that only works if you don’t care about consistent quality and only care about always having the newest, shiniest, greatest. And how, if you are working on software for ESA, or working for one of the largest internet retailers, or if you’re writing a control software for railway switches, waterfall is the only possible option. Even if the target is moving, agile is never able to provide quality. Some of my professors were hired before by large internet retailers to spend weeks trying to understand even their business processes, as the retailer had built their infrastructure without oversight and every employee was working on whatever they wanted. Just this "trying to understand what even is going on" helped them improve their processes and greatly increase their profit margin, as they were able to make many things more efficient with rethinking and rewriting. EDIT: I’ll add my definition of quality here: Your software is able to interact with third parties without them ever having to rewrite their software, your software can run for decades without or with little maintenance, and your software is well documented. In my opinion, Agile is very ill suited for these requirements. One example is the Internet of Things, where you can be sure no one is ever going to update their smart washing machine

sopooneo 11y ago
Why? What that is written in the Agile Manifesto precludes quality?
- kuschku 11y ago
  > Responding to change over following a plan Which, in reality, leads to everyone working on random things, just adding features and somehow patching bugs. But often refactoring the system, rewriting subsystems, etc is necessary. > Working software over comprehensive documentation If your software is working, but there is no documentation, this might work well for a website, but as soon as you go into control systems for the heating of the ISS, or go into railway control systems, or systems that measure the optimum way of packaging a package at an internet retailer, documentation is everything. ---------------- The agile manifesto works kinda, but, to quote a professor, especially the "as long as it works, we don’t need to know what we are doing or have documentation, leads to you carrying all that technical debt around with you all the time". One of the largest european internet retailers fixed their code quality problems by forcing teams to release all code shared between two teams to be released under Apache License on GitHub. Suddenly developers started caring about code quality, reusability, and maintainability.
  - matthewmacleod 11y ago
    Which, in reality, leads to everyone working on random things, just adding features and somehow patching bugs. No, it doesn't. Bad management and process leads to that. But often refactoring the system, rewriting subsystems, etc is necessary. Totally acceptable and something that can easily be included in agile development. If your software is working, but there is no documentation This is not a prerequisite of agile development.
    - kuschku 11y ago
      > > If your software is working, but there is no documentation > This is not a prerequisite of agile development. No, but agile says that software is still quality software, even when documentation doesn’t work. http://www.agilemanifesto.org/ http://www.agilemanifesto.org/ It’s pretty clearly written down.

darkxanthos 11y ago

This. It is so important to separate the practices associated with Agile apart from Agile. One practice I use a ton is retrospectives and really it's useful just as a way of codifying how much and how to experiment with and change team process.