4 ms·

Can we just replace agile, and every modern management practice with some mix of common sense, talking to the customer, talking to the team, and being able to v

• hn_acc_2 6y ago
  But this is the root of all these issues... Because everyone has a different perspective that underlies their "common sense," so this system of unspoken agreement just falls apart. When you throw in the incentives of compensation and career advancement, politics and human nature are bound to corrupt the process further. This is why codified process will always be better in the long run for most companies, because it's the only tool possible for combatting this
  • asplake 6y ago
    ...until codified process becomes the problem. It never ends!
    • brazzledazzle 6y ago
      People that corrupt a process are often the ones it’s designed to stop. It’s not even done with ill intent more often than not. How do you create a paradigm or process that can be amended adapt to a persistent threat without that amendment process itself being used as a tool to corrupt it?
      • asplake 6y ago
        I completely agree that you don’t need to assume ill intent. But by that same token, the fact that a paradigm or process isn’t invulnerable does not mean that it shouldn’t be used. Bureaucracy, heavyweight process, and all rest are ways that systems protect themselves. Wasteful though, which is why new paradigms such as Agile come along. Now the Agile ecosystem has become corrupted by a process not comparable to all the above. Not solvable by those means either. It’s a toughie.
• Ididntdothis 6y ago
  “being able to voice concerns to upper management where people actually listen“ I think that’s what’s missing in most companies. We have 360 reviews, retrospectives and all kinds of stuff but there is no feedback channel up the chain. At my company whenever there are obvious problems management secludes itself and then a solution will be revealed to the underlings who never got heard. Especially in tech it’s pretty safe to assume that engineers at the bottom of the pyramid are as intelligent and educated as people further up the chain so I think their input is valuable.
  • btilly 6y ago
    This problem is endemic. It is human nature that when talking to your boss you put things in the most optimistic way that fits your understanding, and your boss hears it even more optimistically. After a few steps up the chain this results in a complete disconnect from reality. http://www.stamey.info/Humor/shithappens.htm http://www.stamey.info/Humor/shithappens.htm is a humorous but basically accurate take on the dynamic. Now, you say, reality eventually intrudes. Yes, but it is normal for upper management to not realize that deadlines will slip until about 2 weeks before they do. And will continue to think it is about 2 weeks off indefinitely.
    • Jtsummers 6y ago
      > It is human nature that when talking to your boss you put things in the most optimistic way that fits your understanding, and your boss hears it even more optimistically. After a few steps up the chain this results in a complete disconnect from reality. I learned this the hard way, maybe 3 months into my first real job. I was testing safety critical systems, but it was still being developed so the tests procedures were also being developed and executed. I was asked for my status, I said: I've tested about 60% of the system (this one was small enough that that sort of statement was actually valid), everything has passed so far. My boss heard: Everything passed. He released the build to the customer, who found a failure almost immediately (about the same time I did, but I had no idea it had been released). I was taken into a conference room and chewed out for making us look like amateurs (we were, when it came to software). I learned several things: 1) I needed a new job; 2) Never use the words "done", "everything", "all" until everything is actually all done, managers only hear those words and nothing else. > Now, you say, reality eventually intrudes. Yes, but it is normal for upper management to not realize that deadlines will slip until about 2 weeks before they do. And will continue to think it is about 2 weeks off indefinitely. A manager, fortunately not mine I was his peer though he got promoted for his "successes", would always say that his products never shipped late. "How can you say that? I know your last release was 3 months late." "We updated the schedule and we hit the new schedule." "But you didn't update it until the last month. It was 2 months late by then already." "But we hit the final scheduled release date." He just got lucky that the customers weren't loud enough for his boss to realize the spectacular, repeated failure until after he got promoted. The new manager got hit with it instead.
• adamsea 6y ago
  I think the words we're looking for here are "accountability, responsibility, leadership" ;) :/ :| :(
• balfirevic 6y ago
  Are you saying we should emphasize individuals and their interactions, customer collaboration and responding to change? Perhaps also working software? Well, who would have thought :)
  • Ididntdothis 6y ago
    Publish it and you will be rich. Just don't call it "Agile" and nobody will notice.
• commandlinefan 6y ago
  None of that is ever going to happen until management accepts that developers can't give an accurate timeline on the spot, immediately, after a 10-minute overview of the project. Which means never.
  • darepublic 6y ago
    Product Manager > Everyone vote on the story points for this task. Hold up fingers two or three. You there.. why did you put up three? Me > Well um.. because I just thought ticket B is a three and this is comparable complexity. Lead Dev > Yea... this is a two. I mean ticket B.. that can be a two too. Me > Ok Product Manager > Next ticket. Let's say a five? Or a four. Everyone hold up your fingers, is this a five or four Me > (Looks around to see the popular choice. Holds up the same number of fingers)
    • dane-pgp 6y ago
      I experienced a similar situation. The team leader looked back at the past few sprints and worked out how many story points we had completed, and calculated how much our salaries had cost the company in that time, to work out a "cost per story point". He then went off on his own to talk to upper management and committed, without our input, to large new pieces of work, and was told what the budgets for those deliverables were. At the next sprint planning, he was basically telling developers their estimates were wrong because the number of story points we were deciding equated to more money than the budget for those features. Rather than play along, I simply said "Well why don't you come up with the estimates for us, then?". To his credit, he did then stop trying to influence the votes after that, but it wasn't long before the product was put into maintenance mode and he was assigned to a different team.
• Hermel 6y ago
  That sounds almost like the original agile manifesto.
• cs02rm0 6y ago
  No, because management. A key success of agile was to provide a buzzword that let engineers say no when they were asked for a fixed estimate for a fixed-until-it-changes scope to fit in a Gantt chart. Take agile away and they'll be straight back to demanding to know how long it's going to take to build something when no one's really sure what the something is.
• danieldisu 6y ago
  The main problem for me is the misalignment of goals between upper management, middle management and the rest, the higher you climb the less interested they are in they user/client, they only care about some bullshit metric that will end up paying their bonuses. This is specially visible in public companies where they only chase the metrics that the market looks in that decade, ignoring the rest or the actual user satisfaction (they do try to put a metric on that, with bullshit forms and all :))
  • projektfu 6y ago
    XP, and several other processes, identify the problem as a mismatch between the goals of the developer and the actual customer (not necessarily the end user). Management doesn’t figure prominently in the solution which is probably one reason why a different form of Agile is usually chosen. I also don’t know why businesses are so reluctant to have their customers involved in software development. But you’re definitely right, when all the incentives align on the axis of management and their needs, you get garbage. This is not to say that management isn’t useful or necessary, but they are a facilitator of work, not the patron.
    • Leherenn 6y ago
      Because the goals and needs of the upper management and of the customers do not align. There's a lot of companies where delivering what the consumers want/need is not the end goal of the company, at best it's needed to help fulfill the end goal.
• projektfu 6y ago
  Most process pathologies are the result of common sense. Waterfall is a description of the usual reaction to undesirable results on the first project—add more planning steps and make people sign off on phases before moving to the next, more expensive phase.
• robjan 6y ago
  What you just said can't be packaged up and sold as training courses or countless books, which is why it hasn't prevailed.