5 ms·

James Shore: The Decline and Fall of Agile

16 points by eaxitect 16y ago

alextingle 16y ago
I love the way this guy explains the failure of "Agile" by simply saying, "you're not doing it right - you need to be more agile - do it harder!!" For a counterpoint: http://www.yosefk.com/blog/extreme-programming-explained.html http://www.yosefk.com/blog/extreme-programming-explained.htm...
- curtis 16y ago
  My TLDR is: 1. Scrum has been the most successful of the Agile methodologies, and people who are having trouble with Agile are often specifically having trouble with Scrum. 2. Scrum is all about moving to an iterative development model. 3. If you move to an iterative development model without the development practices to support it, you will regret it. 4. Scrum doesn't say anything about development practices, so lots of Scrum teams try to do iterative development without the development practices to support it, and they soon begin to regret it. 5. XP is an alternative since it does specify development practices that are designed to support iterative development. I can't speak to the validity of the author's argument since I don't have any direct Scrum or XP experience, but I think your summary you're not doing it right - you need to be more agile - do it harder!! doesn't do the author's argument justice.
- jdlshore 16y ago
  That's not what I was trying to say, but I can understand why you'd think that. The deeper point was this: "Agile" started out as a grassroots movement among programmers. As a grassroots movement, it got enough people excited, and experienced enough success, that it moved into the mainstream. Now that Agile is in the mainstream, it's attracting attention from people who aren't willing or able to put in the effort required to really understand or do it well. That kind of shallowness has always existed--not just for Agile--but it used to be that the worst those people would do is publish a blowhard essay like the "counterpoint" you linked, then go away. Mainstream Agile isn't so lucky. Now the shallow people don't just flame and go away. They want Agile, but they don't want to work at it. A particularly poisonous subset sees dollar signs and starts offering highly dubious training, certification, and consulting services. Both groups put in something that says "Agile" on the tin but doesn't actually work. And, sadly, there are more people interested in quick-and-easy than there are people who are interested in slow-thoughtful-and-rigorous. They outnumber, and outshout, the rest of us. As a result, the quick-and-easy (and non-functional) approach to Agile is taking over, and the original Agile that I got so excited about is going away. The interesting, motivated, exciting programmers I like to work with are moving on to other things. I wrote that essay three years ago. It's even easier now to see a future in which Agile is just another bloated excuse for managers to treat their staff badly. That makes me sad, but I'll live, and I'll keep fighting the good fight.
  - gruseom 16y ago
    "Agile" started out as a grassroots movement among programmers. That's not true. "Agile" started out as a meeting of methodologists: http://agilemanifesto.org/ http://agilemanifesto.org/ Most people there weren't making a living as programmers and they certainly weren't at the meeting qua programmers. As far as I can tell, only one person on that list (Ward Cunningham) made a name for himself as a hacker. It's true that the Agile people wanted to make corporate software projects less completely hostile to programmers, but it's also true that they were process-oriented from the beginning, i.e. theorizing about how software should be built and convincing others to follow their theories. These are people who make their living writing, consulting, and training, not by writing code or by being personally responsible for particular projects. This gap between theory (often dressed as expertise) and practice is IMO one of the curses of the software industry. Agile may have had some marginal benefit but it also introduced a whole bunch of new ideology. Certainly this was evident as early as 2003-2004 when I was spending time in that crowd. An example of a real grassroots movement among programmers is open-source software.
    - jdlshore 16y ago
      The name "Agile" was coined in 2001, but the movement now known as Agile started in the late 90's. I've been involved with it for 11 years. It was most certainly a grass-roots movement when it started. Much of the early discussion took place on the C2 wiki and can still be seen--look there to see for yourself.
    - parasubvert 16y ago
      XP, the real catalyst to agile, was born out of the Smalltalk hacker community with Kent Beck and Ward Cunningham in particular. They're the furthest from methodologists I could imagine. The only professional methodologists on the agile manifesto, for that matter, were Alistair Cockburn and maybe Jim Highsmith. And even they were all about preaching for less paperwork & process. The rest were in the trenches software team leads or (at worst) software consultants like Martin Fowler.
      - gruseom 16y ago
- chromatic 16y ago
  you're not doing it right That's a facile, if persistent, criticism. An agile process such as XP has always said "If you practice technical discipline, work in short work units, deliver working and completed milestones frequently, work directly with your stakeholders at the tactical and strategic levels, and collect and respond to feedback as frequently as possible, you can deliver great code and delight your customers." Someone who decides from that to have standup meetings every day, push some code out the door once a month, and not write documentation missed a few necessary conditions.

16 points by eaxitect 16y ago

I love the way this guy explains the failure of "Agile" by simply saying, "you're not doing it right - you need to be more agile - do it harder!!" For a counterpoint: http://www.yosefk.com/blog/extreme-programming-explained.html http://www.yosefk.com/blog/extreme-programming-explained.htm...

curtis 16y ago
My TLDR is: 1. Scrum has been the most successful of the Agile methodologies, and people who are having trouble with Agile are often specifically having trouble with Scrum. 2. Scrum is all about moving to an iterative development model. 3. If you move to an iterative development model without the development practices to support it, you will regret it. 4. Scrum doesn't say anything about development practices, so lots of Scrum teams try to do iterative development without the development practices to support it, and they soon begin to regret it. 5. XP is an alternative since it does specify development practices that are designed to support iterative development. I can't speak to the validity of the author's argument since I don't have any direct Scrum or XP experience, but I think your summary you're not doing it right - you need to be more agile - do it harder!! doesn't do the author's argument justice.
jdlshore 16y ago
That's not what I was trying to say, but I can understand why you'd think that. The deeper point was this: "Agile" started out as a grassroots movement among programmers. As a grassroots movement, it got enough people excited, and experienced enough success, that it moved into the mainstream. Now that Agile is in the mainstream, it's attracting attention from people who aren't willing or able to put in the effort required to really understand or do it well. That kind of shallowness has always existed--not just for Agile--but it used to be that the worst those people would do is publish a blowhard essay like the "counterpoint" you linked, then go away. Mainstream Agile isn't so lucky. Now the shallow people don't just flame and go away. They want Agile, but they don't want to work at it. A particularly poisonous subset sees dollar signs and starts offering highly dubious training, certification, and consulting services. Both groups put in something that says "Agile" on the tin but doesn't actually work. And, sadly, there are more people interested in quick-and-easy than there are people who are interested in slow-thoughtful-and-rigorous. They outnumber, and outshout, the rest of us. As a result, the quick-and-easy (and non-functional) approach to Agile is taking over, and the original Agile that I got so excited about is going away. The interesting, motivated, exciting programmers I like to work with are moving on to other things. I wrote that essay three years ago. It's even easier now to see a future in which Agile is just another bloated excuse for managers to treat their staff badly. That makes me sad, but I'll live, and I'll keep fighting the good fight.
- gruseom 16y ago
  "Agile" started out as a grassroots movement among programmers. That's not true. "Agile" started out as a meeting of methodologists: http://agilemanifesto.org/ http://agilemanifesto.org/ Most people there weren't making a living as programmers and they certainly weren't at the meeting qua programmers. As far as I can tell, only one person on that list (Ward Cunningham) made a name for himself as a hacker. It's true that the Agile people wanted to make corporate software projects less completely hostile to programmers, but it's also true that they were process-oriented from the beginning, i.e. theorizing about how software should be built and convincing others to follow their theories. These are people who make their living writing, consulting, and training, not by writing code or by being personally responsible for particular projects. This gap between theory (often dressed as expertise) and practice is IMO one of the curses of the software industry. Agile may have had some marginal benefit but it also introduced a whole bunch of new ideology. Certainly this was evident as early as 2003-2004 when I was spending time in that crowd. An example of a real grassroots movement among programmers is open-source software.
  - jdlshore 16y ago
    The name "Agile" was coined in 2001, but the movement now known as Agile started in the late 90's. I've been involved with it for 11 years. It was most certainly a grass-roots movement when it started. Much of the early discussion took place on the C2 wiki and can still be seen--look there to see for yourself.
  - parasubvert 16y ago
    XP, the real catalyst to agile, was born out of the Smalltalk hacker community with Kent Beck and Ward Cunningham in particular. They're the furthest from methodologists I could imagine. The only professional methodologists on the agile manifesto, for that matter, were Alistair Cockburn and maybe Jim Highsmith. And even they were all about preaching for less paperwork & process. The rest were in the trenches software team leads or (at worst) software consultants like Martin Fowler.
    - gruseom 16y ago
chromatic 16y ago
you're not doing it right That's a facile, if persistent, criticism. An agile process such as XP has always said "If you practice technical discipline, work in short work units, deliver working and completed milestones frequently, work directly with your stakeholders at the tactical and strategic levels, and collect and respond to feedback as frequently as possible, you can deliver great code and delight your customers." Someone who decides from that to have standup meetings every day, push some code out the door once a month, and not write documentation missed a few necessary conditions.