3 ms·

For me it's more like this: prototype, design, implement. I do some lightweight planning while I prototype. All of this is anathema to Agile. Prototyping alone

• thawkins 11y ago
  Agile, supports prototyping, and design, its just a task, maybe you where being too litteral about things.
  • melted 11y ago
    Sure it does, about like the USSR supported freedom of speech. What do you report in your daily standup? What if your prototyping takes four weeks instead of two? How about if your problem is particularly gnarly and it takes six weeks? What if it's only reasonable to devote, say, two people out of the team of six to prototyping? Do they report status (which they already know) to each other? "Syncing up" with them is useless for the rest of the team. What if I'm already an adult and therefore don't need adult supervision? Why would you want to interrupt my "make time" with your bullshit, useless standup, thus knocking me out of my zone for an hour or more? On the teams that I ran, we relied on a weekly meeting, lasting about 30-45 minutes to go over what we did last week and what the plans are for this week. The rest is handled perfectly well with ad-hoc communication. Those teams were far more "agile" than any of the Agile teams I've seen, since people expended all their effort on achieving the goals as opposed to figuring out what they're going to say in the next standup.
    • bane 11y ago
      That's basically how I run my teams also. Weekly tempo-setting meetings to go over status and adjust planning as needed. Plans are made with broad brush strokes and are expected to be fluid and details are figured out during development. Planning sets goals, and are used to time box the work (even if the boxes are different sizes, so no adherence to stupid 2-week one size fits all sprints). Pre-planning makes it easy to get stakeholder buy-in without having to go into deep philosophical development notions. Ad-hoc communications and gasp my involvement with the teams covers 90% of the rest and if major problems occur, the appropriate parties are pulled into a meeting to discuss and resolve. My teams are pretty consistently the most productive performers in my organization, use the fewest people and resources, and produce the highest quality product at the end of the day. As a result, my teams are consistently in demand to work on things, and once they're out of my hands and back into some scrummaster's their performance goes back to normal. I've noticed an inverse correlation on all of these metrics the more "Agile/Scrum" the teams seem to be. Between standups, retrospectives, scrums, and whatever activities the other groups get mired down in, the consistent complaint is that nobody seems to have time to actually get anything done. The problem is that Agile is supposed to be about liberating teams from process and tools and documentation and so on and focus on people and product. However, the Industry that's exploded around "Agile" has simply created another pile of rigid processes that bring everybody back to square one again. Even worse, most people in the industry are so young they think this is better than what the old fuddy-duddies greybeards used to do and don't have the perspective to realize they've just become trapped in another set of process ceremonies that get applied to everything without regard to the nature of the task at hand. I just got out of sitting in another team's sprint planning meeting and they spent 2 hours trying to figure out how to fit O&M and R&D into their next sprints...30 minutes of which was spent figuring out how to model the Epics. Agile is a great idea in theory. Agile in practice is a terrible one.
  • spacecowboy_lon 11y ago
    Agree I worked on a project (to manage the UK's core SMDS network) where we had a long planing process (over 6 months) but built the product in a 12 week sprint at the end.
• hderms 11y ago
  I really wish more companies embraced prototyping. I think it's really foolish that it's looked at as wasted value a lot of the time.