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The Church of Agile
- maxxxxx 9y ago"Agile" should have stopped at the Agile Manifesto. Everything else just made it worse.
- organsnyder 9y agoWhenever a movement takes root, an ecosystem jumps up that attempts to productize and commoditize it. We're seeing the same thing with DevOps, which is being sold as CICD, ignoring the cultural bits that make CICD effective (in fact, if you do the cultural bits, you'll probably end up recognizing the need for CICD at some point, regardless of whether you included it initially). Peeling back the layers, a lot of these philosophies include principles that have been found in high-performing organizations for decades: 1. Transparency 2. Seeking input from all levels of the org chart 3. Involving stakeholders early and often 4. Constructing incentives around desired metrics 5. Fast feedback 6. Rapid iteration 7. Reproducible processes 8. Constant, systemized reassessment That last one is where "Agile" has lost its meaning: Hiring certified ScrumMasters® doesn't make you agile. Scrum and the like can be useful frameworks, but if you don't absorb the above principles into the core of your organization (including outside of the IS department!), you'll end up with AgileScrumFall at best.
- maxxxxx 9y agoThe same happened with OOP and design patterns. It will happen with FP too. As soon as something works and is useful, "gurus" and consultants appear who make it digestible to mediocre devs and upper management but in reality they are just caricatures of the original intent.
- ktRolster 9y agoIT always entertains me that Agile companies tend to be so focused on process, and yet the agile manifesto specifically de-emphasizes process. Agile is almost always a process. It doesn't focus on improving the people and interactions. That's unfortunate.
- foo4u 9y ago> Programming in C/C++, Java, Javascript, that's easy, anyone can write code. But having the skill of standing in a circle and saying what you've been working on, what you will be working on, and if you have any blockers, that takes pure talent. That may be the dumbest thing I read all week.
- tempodox 9y agoA nice desecration, as I hoped it would be. The bit about git hit the spot.
- grandalf 9y agoI think Agile is a response to the reality that in many organizations writing code is a thankless and cynicism-inspiring burden. Agile tips the balance and puts the technical team in control of process and expectation management in a way that lets everybody feel very good about how much they got done, regardless of whether there is good code being written or successful product/market fit. It's also possible to justify quite a bit of architecture debt by deferring to agile principles and punting on systems thinking in favor of finishing a few n point stories, rinsing and repeating. I'd say that if you have a team that is cynical due to changing requirements and technically naive management (or clients/stakeholders) then agile might be a great approach. Or, if the sort of predictability and transparency offered by agile is of great value to the organization for some other reason. In general I think that sprint velocity is a vanity metric that has nothing to do with product market fit or system quality. The "retrospective" meeting is a nice idea, but the presence of a few complainers/gripers on the team can turn this into a morale-draining blamefest.
- Domenic_S 9y agoThis is a weird comment. Assuming we're talking about a company of any real size, why is product/market fit the responsibility of engineering?
- jrs235 9y ago>regardless of whether there is good code being written or successful product/market fit. I don't think OP is suggesting that engineering is responsible for product/market fit but rather sprints and burndown charts provide some visibility and satisfaction that work is getting done (regardless of whether the code is clean and regardless of whether it is the work that ought to be getting worked on). I take the OP to be pointing out the reason that agile gets adopted and it's short comings that get overlooked because it makes people feel good. Clueless management is clueless. They often feel that nothing gets done without some visible artifact. Agile allows the dev/engineering team to help show the tasks and behind the scenes things that need to be done. Clueless management likes Agile for this visibility. But Agile doesn't necessarily ensure proper product/market fit, especially early on when the first sprints deal with architecture setup foundation code. Clueless management doesn't understand this (and it is managements job to ensure the dev team/engineering team is working on the correct solution).
- 1_2__4 9y agoIn my experience Agile is most prevalent where the engineering culture is the weakest. When engineering culture is strong and effective, it's unnecessary. Where engineering is simply the business side's bitch is when you end up with a massive multi-tentacled PMO organization attempting to use their Agile hammer on anything vaguely nail-looking, cheered on by Chief Revenue Officers and Heads of Product who love that they have a direct line to individual engineering teams... Without any of that pesky engineering leadership getting in the way.
- maxxxxx 9y agoCorrect. That's one of the reasons why I am looking to leave my current job. Ultimately management has no appreciation or understanding of software development so most projects have more managers asking "insightful" questions or asking for status than people doing the work.
- 1_2__4 9y agoYou're not alone.
- lowbloodsugar 9y agoI've used Scrum in startups with strong engineering culture, and it helps align engineering and "the business" (sales, marketing, 'what are we building', 'for who'). As an engineer, Scrum helped me expose 'the realities' of software engineering to people who did't get it. For example, the communication helped us change priorities to get value into the product. Unfortunately, "Agile" is now mainstream bullshit, and, as you say, its now used by the business to just bypass any kind of engineering mastery, and just hire a bunch of junior devs and tell them what to do. "Scrum masters" are just "yes men". Most times, when a company says "We do Agile" they mean "We hired a bunch of script kiddies on a constant death march". Scrum is about empowering developers, but Scrum itself does not empower them. If the developers are already empowered, then I believe it's useful for communication and direction. If the developers are not already empowered, then Scrum is actively bad. Scrum cannot empower developers. Scrum with disempowered developers is just disempowered developers but now without any kind of SDLC safety net.
- gnicholas 9y ago> Thou shalt spread the word about Agile to everyone I know. Probably shouldn't be "I". Only posting this on the off-chance that the author reads HN comments.
- languagehacker 9y agoThis is a website written in PHP by someone who doesn't like how their scrum team is being run. I'm going to assume that based on the tone of this site, the author is a very junior developer -- mostly because I think a mid-to-senior software engineer would be brutally embarrassed to publish and share something like this with a wider audience. Everything there is to be said about agile has been said. Good teams adopt the right take on the process for them. Teams with poor cohesion, who would likely struggle with or without project management, may have some cookie-cutter version of the process forced on them. This is usually a sign of a dysfunctional team -- not necessarily a dysfunctional process. The author may actually be the bad apple derailing a process that works for the team as a whole. Look at all the complaints! Assuming it's actually a team of seven, you're talking about one seventh of the team probably visibly seething at every standup because they feel put upon by someone forcing a process on them. I imagine that's a lot of tension for the other six people to bear. Look, I've written plenty of things I'm embarrassed by -- particularly in the beginning of my career. Blog posts and the like are a great way to let off some steam about how unsatisfied you are with your job. But if you're anything like me, you're going to look back at stuff like this and regret how bad your attitude was. My advice straight to the author: You probably spent more time writing this site than the amount of time you've actually lost to your daily standup. If you're not happy with your job, then quit it. But I've got to warn you: odds are you're not going to be running the show at the next job either. I can tell from this site that you're just really mad that people are telling you what to do. Answering to someone else is a part of literally any job. It's a pretty fundamental part of participating in society. You're going to end up being just as miserable wherever you land if you don't take a look in the mirror and invest some time into improving your attitude and focusing on positive, productive interactions with your co-workers.
- grandalf 9y agoSince it sounds like you very much favor agile, I'm curious about your take on the following questions: - What adaptations to classic agile have you seen successful teams make that you think were very smart decisions? - What sort of project is agile best for? worst for? - How can agile help to find product-market fit? Or is it completely separate from that? - What sort of alternative project management approach do you think has failed so often that Agile became necessary as a fundamental rethink of the old way?
- CSMastermind 9y agoWhen most people say Agile they mean Scrum. Scrum great up around the culture of web consulting. That makes it a good way to do web consulting, an alright way to do web development, and a pretty bad way to do anything else.
- tannhaeuser 9y agoIs the term SCRUM trademarked? Asking because I'm still seeing a business opportunity here for selling "official" SCRUM master certificates. Believe it or not (and reflecting on non-engineer's desire for status symbols of even the most absurd kind), there are people who, when asked what their profession is, will without irony answer "scrum master".
- tannhaeuser 9y agoI think the flat hierarchy in the Scrum religion is an oversight. When designing a religion, what you generally want is a sense of accomplishment as you climb the ladder towards alumni status, with knowledge revealed in rituals such as commercial lectures and materials along the way. This is what gives people a sense of achievement, keeps people stick to a religion, and makes a decision to drop out increasingly hard. L. Ron Hubbard did know about this aspect of human nature all too well.
- felipeccastro 9y agoI wonder if any of these Agile haters ever had the pleasure of working with RUP (Rational Unified Process) and endless UML diagrams. Agile was a response to that trend, cutting the BS and recommending teams would focus more on software quality and collaboration and less on worthless processes. It was a cultural shift more than anything else, and a very welcome one. Sure, lots of people tried to "sell Agile" by pushing sticky notes everywhere and replacing "Project Manager" with "Scrum Master", as if these changes alone would solve all their problems. This does not mean that Agile itself was a bad idea, it only means that anything that goes mainstream is bound to be misunderstood and misused by a lot of people.
- lasereyes136 9y agoHe forgot the mumble talker in his list of people that come to the Daily Stand Up.