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> To all the people jeering for Agile's demise, please provide a superior alternative. The goal of Agile is to let smart people work incrementally towards a so
by thomascgalvin 7y ago
> To all the people jeering for Agile's demise, please provide a superior alternative.
The goal of Agile is to let smart people work incrementally towards a somewhat nebulous goal. The ceremony that's arisen around that tends to be put in place by people who feel the need to manage, but don't know how to help their developers achieve that goal.
The alternative, as far as I've seen, is to hire smart, curious people, let them work closely with the end user, and pay them a lot of money. In this situation, the engineers will typically self-organize effectively.
- closeparen 7y agoMy org was like that when it was 20 people on one floor doing pretty much their own thing in groups of 2-4. Now it’s 100 people across two countries, expected to collaborate closely with sibling orgs. Management philosophy has shifted to “we will ask a few handpicked experts to write down the best way to do a thing, and then everyone else is a machine for executing that procedure.” If software engineering worked like that, we would have automated it.
- parasubvert 7y agoBut, see, Engineers do not self-organize effectively, without some kind of frame of constraints to guide them - customers/users, design, time, quality, tech, architecture, etc. Assembling a talented team that ultimately delivers nothing of value is practically a cliche in this industry.