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Agile is fine, but I believe it was born as an overreaction to Waterfall and excessive processes, the generation that followed blindly adopted it as a dogma, ev

Agile is fine, but I believe it was born as an overreaction to Waterfall and excessive processes, the generation that followed blindly adopted it as a dogma, even when the project at hand doesn't benefit from it (also because "agile" is a great marketing word w/ positive meaning, and leaders suffer from FoMo.). People who've been at the trenches long enough seem to be waking up to this fact, and we must be careful to not overreact on our own. Agile seems great when both you and the customer have zero idea what you're doing, but not all projects are creating something completely new. I've seen enough projects fall into the trap of reinventing the (square) wheel by 1. not trying to state the problem correctly 2. doing zero research 3. not even interviewing more experienced people. Creating something that nobody asked for and failing fast is supposed to be agile, but agile says nothing about how to calculate risk/reward, or just assumes prototype are super cheap. That's rarely the case in practice - I've never see a prototype being tossed away, just turning into technical debt. Nowadays I much prefer the Cynefin framework [1] to reason about problems and projects, even if it's not super clear on how to apply, because it at least makes you consider two degrees of freedom. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cynefin_framework https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cynefin_framework

eterm 7y ago
You've made a good point and touched on something I feel is sometimes the case: Agile is used as an excuse not to spend money on market research.
ryanmarsh 7y ago
Agile coaches love to name drop Cynefin, having zero understanding of it and having never read anything of David Snowden's. Cynefin is great, but it is merely an abstract set of principles.
ravenstine 7y ago
Has any software or creative company ever actually adopted "waterfall"? It seems like a straw man used to criticize inefficient processes and promote Agile, but has it ever been implemented in the way that it's described? More importantly, is there any actual evidence that Agile is works better than alternatives?
- cglong 7y ago
  I was on a team at Microsoft that was strictly Waterfall; our business reps wanted to release functionality in six month cycles, so Waterfall was a good fit. We eventually moved to Lean (a type of Agile) which worked well with this six-month requirement. It gave engineers the ability to work on different pieces and in whatever order they pleased, as long as everything landed in the six-month block.
- stcredzero 7y ago
  Has any software or creative company ever actually adopted "waterfall"? Yes. My last company was squarely "Waterfall" (though it wasn't called that) and is moving to "Agile."
- jiveturkey 7y ago
  > Has any software or creative company ever actually adopted "waterfall"? Yes, plenty. I once worked at a CMM level 4 company. Network hardware vendor, before the days that FPGA was really useful. You had to get your shit right, the first time.
stcredzero 7y ago
was born as an overreaction to _X_ and excessive processes, the generation that followed blindly adopted _Y_ as a dogma This happens to everything. It's a pattern as pervasive as Sturgeon's Law, and may well be related to it. Musical genres come about as a reaction to the excesses of dominant genres, then become a dominant genre themselves. This happens to books, TV shows, movies, video games -- basically everything in modern culture. It even happens in academia and in startups. The reason for this pattern, is that it's often hard to understand the underlying forces and the cost-benefit factors and incentives that shaped _X_ and _Y_. The solution for getting yourself out of the churn of rejecting the old "paradigm" or whatever and adopting the new, is to understand the underlying forces and react directly to them. If you're going to react and deal only with the surfaces of things -- isn't that kind of the definition of the "Cargo Cult" mentality? (also because "agile" is a great marketing word w/ positive meaning, and leaders suffer from FoMo.) At my last company, Agile was the specific response to smaller competitors having quicker iteration cycles. I think it's wholly appropriate response in that case. Also, at one company I interviewed at, it seems that their version of Agile was going towards the "mini-iterated-waterfall" variant, with the manager advocating that every story be broken down to minute-enough detail that estimates would finally be nearly 100% accurate. Are those mistakes or the right move? Time will tell. From the article: What Agile actually is remains vague, even more so than Object Orientation ever was, and that’s no simple feat. Object Orientation is just a vague strategy for code organization. What it actually is depends on the particular techniques and the context of the group actually implementing those. In that, there is a deep parallel to Agile and to religious dogmas and personal philosophy: It's pointless to talk about something so vague, while it's productive to examine specific groups in their success or failure in implementation. In other words, don't confuse guidelines and techniques for silver bullets and magic. Don't comply with _Y_ just so you can label yourself "Y." Look at your structure of cost/benefit and the team's incentives and figure out how guidelines and techniques mesh with those.
- cma 7y ago
  Are you saying if we only understood the cost-benefit factors and incentives that shaped music genre _X_ we'd only need on genre of music and all successors would seem out of place?
oceanghost 7y ago
"Moral reforms and deteriorations are moved by large forces, and they are mostly caused by reactions from the habits of a preceding period. Backward and forwards swings the great pendulum, and its alternations are not determined by a few distinguished folk clinging to the end of it." — Sir Charles Petrie, The Victorians

eterm 7y ago

You've made a good point and touched on something I feel is sometimes the case: Agile is used as an excuse not to spend money on market research.

ryanmarsh 7y ago

Agile coaches love to name drop Cynefin, having zero understanding of it and having never read anything of David Snowden's. Cynefin is great, but it is merely an abstract set of principles.

ravenstine 7y ago

Has any software or creative company ever actually adopted "waterfall"? It seems like a straw man used to criticize inefficient processes and promote Agile, but has it ever been implemented in the way that it's described? More importantly, is there any actual evidence that Agile is works better than alternatives?

cglong 7y ago
I was on a team at Microsoft that was strictly Waterfall; our business reps wanted to release functionality in six month cycles, so Waterfall was a good fit. We eventually moved to Lean (a type of Agile) which worked well with this six-month requirement. It gave engineers the ability to work on different pieces and in whatever order they pleased, as long as everything landed in the six-month block.
stcredzero 7y ago
Has any software or creative company ever actually adopted "waterfall"? Yes. My last company was squarely "Waterfall" (though it wasn't called that) and is moving to "Agile."
jiveturkey 7y ago
> Has any software or creative company ever actually adopted "waterfall"? Yes, plenty. I once worked at a CMM level 4 company. Network hardware vendor, before the days that FPGA was really useful. You had to get your shit right, the first time.

stcredzero 7y ago

was born as an overreaction to _X_ and excessive processes, the generation that followed blindly adopted _Y_ as a dogma This happens to everything. It's a pattern as pervasive as Sturgeon's Law, and may well be related to it. Musical genres come about as a reaction to the excesses of dominant genres, then become a dominant genre themselves. This happens to books, TV shows, movies, video games -- basically everything in modern culture. It even happens in academia and in startups. The reason for this pattern, is that it's often hard to understand the underlying forces and the cost-benefit factors and incentives that shaped _X_ and _Y_. The solution for getting yourself out of the churn of rejecting the old "paradigm" or whatever and adopting the new, is to understand the underlying forces and react directly to them. If you're going to react and deal only with the surfaces of things -- isn't that kind of the definition of the "Cargo Cult" mentality? (also because "agile" is a great marketing word w/ positive meaning, and leaders suffer from FoMo.) At my last company, Agile was the specific response to smaller competitors having quicker iteration cycles. I think it's wholly appropriate response in that case. Also, at one company I interviewed at, it seems that their version of Agile was going towards the "mini-iterated-waterfall" variant, with the manager advocating that every story be broken down to minute-enough detail that estimates would finally be nearly 100% accurate. Are those mistakes or the right move? Time will tell. From the article: What Agile actually is remains vague, even more so than Object Orientation ever was, and that’s no simple feat. Object Orientation is just a vague strategy for code organization. What it actually is depends on the particular techniques and the context of the group actually implementing those. In that, there is a deep parallel to Agile and to religious dogmas and personal philosophy: It's pointless to talk about something so vague, while it's productive to examine specific groups in their success or failure in implementation. In other words, don't confuse guidelines and techniques for silver bullets and magic. Don't comply with _Y_ just so you can label yourself "Y." Look at your structure of cost/benefit and the team's incentives and figure out how guidelines and techniques mesh with those.

cma 7y ago
Are you saying if we only understood the cost-benefit factors and incentives that shaped music genre _X_ we'd only need on genre of music and all successors would seem out of place?

oceanghost 7y ago

"Moral reforms and deteriorations are moved by large forces, and they are mostly caused by reactions from the habits of a preceding period. Backward and forwards swings the great pendulum, and its alternations are not determined by a few distinguished folk clinging to the end of it." — Sir Charles Petrie, The Victorians