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All of the (few) successful projects I've been on have been ones where the team whole-heartedly rejected agile practices. On the other hand, every single "agil

All of the (few) successful projects I've been on have been ones where the team whole-heartedly rejected agile practices. On the other hand, every single "agile" project I've been on devolved rapidly into a sweatshop environment with a hack-ridden nightmare of tightly coupled bad code cobbled together with more tightly coupled bad code. I've come to the conclusion that "agile" is what the talentless hackers hide behind in order to avoid the scrutiny of being found out as incompetent. As long as "heroes" garner rewards, those folks will be the norm rather than the rule, and any process you use with a team like that will lead to failure. Making things worse (for agile) is that the most vocal proponents for it are typically the sort of people who would rather avoid the had part of actually doing any sort of engineering, and would rather just jump in and start writing code, even if that means writing code with an actual goal in mind. Managers appear to love this, because they still think that lines of code = productivity. The result? Agile projects fail. No process can save a project from its own team, though.

calibraxis 16y ago
Which aspects of the Agile Manifesto led to problems? And were the teams using sufficiently agile languages? (Say, Python or Lisp?) Or was it more a matter of the teams saying "agile" and meaning "cowboy coding"?
- Tamerlin 16y ago
  Ruby. The strongest agile proponents that I have met prefer Java. I think that's probably enough to estimate their "caliber" right off the bat. The strongest proponents of agile that I've met use agile as an excuse for cowboy coding, though my friends and I generally refer to them as hackers, because all they do is hack things together in a big hurry. You work in "agile" environments like that for a few years, and you start to equate "agile" with "sweatshop." Since without exception every "agile" project I've worked on has been a sweatshop with an agile label, you'd be hard pressed to convince me to use agile methods for anything even vaguely related to developing software.
  - stcredzero 16y ago
    Whatever happened to the "40 Hour Week" pillar of XP?
    - Tamerlin 16y ago
      I don't think the agilistas get it -- there's too much hero worship in the industry, and the newbie developers who haven't bothered to learn how to design software that actually works play right into the hands of the legions of incompetent managers out there who still believe that lines of code and hours in seat are measures of productivity.
      - calibraxis 16y ago
        That makes sense. When I checked the Agile Manifesto, I expected to find something about a 40 hour workweek. What I found instead was something watered-down about "sustainability", which effectively means next to nothing. "Self-organizing" also is near-meaningless; it maybe means that teams won't be micromanaged (not that many managers want to deal with the most tedious issues of a team anyway), but working hours are treated as a macro issue. ("I don't know what you're doing, but you'd better do a lot of it!")
        Tamerlin 16y ago
        I've had a number of projects in which the management complained that the developers weren't writing any code, but they refused to take the time to answer our questions about requirements. One actually said that if he was to write down the project's requirements, he might as well just write the software. (That project failed pretty impressively after I left it... I refused to bail it out a 2nd time.)
  - deleted 16y ago
    [deleted]

calibraxis 16y ago

Which aspects of the Agile Manifesto led to problems? And were the teams using sufficiently agile languages? (Say, Python or Lisp?) Or was it more a matter of the teams saying "agile" and meaning "cowboy coding"?

Tamerlin 16y ago
Ruby. The strongest agile proponents that I have met prefer Java. I think that's probably enough to estimate their "caliber" right off the bat. The strongest proponents of agile that I've met use agile as an excuse for cowboy coding, though my friends and I generally refer to them as hackers, because all they do is hack things together in a big hurry. You work in "agile" environments like that for a few years, and you start to equate "agile" with "sweatshop." Since without exception every "agile" project I've worked on has been a sweatshop with an agile label, you'd be hard pressed to convince me to use agile methods for anything even vaguely related to developing software.
- stcredzero 16y ago
  Whatever happened to the "40 Hour Week" pillar of XP?
  - Tamerlin 16y ago
    I don't think the agilistas get it -- there's too much hero worship in the industry, and the newbie developers who haven't bothered to learn how to design software that actually works play right into the hands of the legions of incompetent managers out there who still believe that lines of code and hours in seat are measures of productivity.
    - calibraxis 16y ago
      That makes sense. When I checked the Agile Manifesto, I expected to find something about a 40 hour workweek. What I found instead was something watered-down about "sustainability", which effectively means next to nothing. "Self-organizing" also is near-meaningless; it maybe means that teams won't be micromanaged (not that many managers want to deal with the most tedious issues of a team anyway), but working hours are treated as a macro issue. ("I don't know what you're doing, but you'd better do a lot of it!")
      - Tamerlin 16y ago
        I've had a number of projects in which the management complained that the developers weren't writing any code, but they refused to take the time to answer our questions about requirements. One actually said that if he was to write down the project's requirements, he might as well just write the software. (That project failed pretty impressively after I left it... I refused to bail it out a 2nd time.)
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]