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>Workers have to be lined up in their swim lanes and the whole thing has to be orchestrated... you know, like actual agile instead of the reactive pfaffery that

>Workers have to be lined up in their swim lanes and the whole thing has to be orchestrated... you know, like actual agile instead of the reactive pfaffery that everyone passes off as "hybrid agile" (boy do I hear that phrase a lot in diligence!) Swim lanes isn't agile per se, it's just business communicating their priorities and assigning it to development. I remember when agile came out, it was great from the development point of view. It was almost immediately perverted by consultants trying to make a buck trying to sell scrum as a panacea to all development costs and overruns. There's an awful lot of snake oil salesmen in tech. Other than that, I agree with everything you said. https://agilemanifesto.org/principles.html https://agilemanifesto.org/principles.html

mumblemumble 5y ago
The Agile Manifesto is not gospel. For starters, I would argue that, "The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation," has proven, in the fullness of time, to be an oversimplification. More importantly, the Agile Manifesto not saying something two decades ago does not mean that it has no place in contemporary agile software development. We've had 20 years' worth of time to learn since then. It would be a shame if we hadn't. To that end, I do think that active orchestration - and, for that matter, written communication - is critical to being really agile at any sort of scale. It doesn't necessarily need to be done using swim lanes, but they do happen to be a nice mental model (and visual mnemonic) for keeping track of real-world phenomena such as varying quality of service obligations. But I also think that it makes sense to leave them out of any concrete definition of what it means to be agile. Not only is there more than one way to satisfy that need, there's also no guarantee that every team will have that need.
iainctduncan 5y ago
Agreed. I'm using it as a loose metaphor here, I just mean in general, they need to be a lot more organized and proactive. I've seen many varieties of agile and not-so-agile work well.... if they have their shit together. And even the most well though out agile process can be a gong show if they don't.

mumblemumble 5y ago

The Agile Manifesto is not gospel. For starters, I would argue that, "The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation," has proven, in the fullness of time, to be an oversimplification. More importantly, the Agile Manifesto not saying something two decades ago does not mean that it has no place in contemporary agile software development. We've had 20 years' worth of time to learn since then. It would be a shame if we hadn't. To that end, I do think that active orchestration - and, for that matter, written communication - is critical to being really agile at any sort of scale. It doesn't necessarily need to be done using swim lanes, but they do happen to be a nice mental model (and visual mnemonic) for keeping track of real-world phenomena such as varying quality of service obligations. But I also think that it makes sense to leave them out of any concrete definition of what it means to be agile. Not only is there more than one way to satisfy that need, there's also no guarantee that every team will have that need.

iainctduncan 5y ago

Agreed. I'm using it as a loose metaphor here, I just mean in general, they need to be a lot more organized and proactive. I've seen many varieties of agile and not-so-agile work well.... if they have their shit together. And even the most well though out agile process can be a gong show if they don't.