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> if you succeed with "agile", you would have succeeded as well or better without it. It's never why you were successful, but is often why projects fail. I wou
by jboy55 5y ago
> if you succeed with "agile", you would have succeeded as well or better without it. It's never why you were successful, but is often why projects fail.
I would love to see some counter examples where companies succeeded writing business/application software using a well-defined process that wasn't 'Agile'. So please, let me know the counter example, what process is the alternative?
- _y5hn 5y agoThis is where the discussion turns silly, as agile/agility is not a process.
- jboy55 5y agoOk, Scrum, Extreme, Rational Unified are some processes with a degree of Agility. What are the alternatives?
- _y5hn 5y agoProjects of course. They don't have to adhere to some theoretical waterfall process, and anecdotally never have. There's Kanban, and any informal process a group of cross-functional people may come up with. In fact, it's much more important to make something that works, than copying some task-list because it's said to have worked somewhere else. Incidentally, and this is going to shake up the "Agile" world going forward, is the missing piece, the link to management (budgets and trust really!) and innovation (the creative spark!). That should be less about process, and much more about culture and learning. That has remained elusive and underappreciated. Google Design Sprint may be the closest "process", though will still depend more on the mentioned above. With a great team, it anyway depends on the people. Though, the experience and output also depends on who you ask. Which is why great teams may get split up, for good reasons but also bad reasons at the same time. Though try put the most brilliant people together. They will annoy eachother into oblivion. So it's about the art of building diverse teams and mixing with what's mentioned above, because nothing thrives in a vacuum.
- jboy55 5y agoI would call all that you described as Agile, sorry. > In fact, it's much more important to make something that works, than copying some task-list because it's said to have worked somewhere else. > That should be less about process, and much more about culture and learning That pretty much describes the manifesto. If you are saying regimented Scrum implemented by a rigid command hierarchy that assigns stories and demands story points per sprint. Well, those management hierarchies existed in the pre-scrum project world in spades, just as it exists now. Those management systems do not want to allow creative engineers, they want factory workers who they can measure the relative output and remove the lowest performers. They exist outside of any 'process' framework, or manifesto or the lack of one. What probably writers of the manifesto did not completely see, is these management structures signing up for their manifesto trainings, then turning around and doing what they always did.
- _y5hn 5y agoHence my first comment ;) Good post, yes and branding it "Agile".
- g051051 5y agoYour question implies that there was no successful software development before the Agile Manifesto was written, and that all successful software development since it was written has been exclusively done as "agile" development.
- jboy55 5y agoNo... its asking for the alternative. Your answer implies there is none, or that you don't want to propose one that could easily be shot down.
- g051051 5y agoThe alternative is the way that software was successfully developed and delivered for the decades prior to the existence of the Agile manifesto, and the software that was successfully developed and delivered in the time between when the manifesto was written and when it start infecting the software development industry. In other words, just look at literally any other software product created and delivered before 2001, and up until about 2008 or so.
- jboy55 5y agoSo... some process that wasn't agile... that had no name, no principles... but it worked! Was this a singular process, that everyone just 'knew'? Or did every company have their own, that varied in principles and effectiveness. What if a group of people sat down and tried studying what worked and what didn't... say in the .. 2001 time frame, I wonder what they would come up with.
- g051051 5y agoWell, since they came up with "Agile", it's pretty clear they didn't actually survey what worked and what didn't. They were consultants selling methodologies, and came up with something that was so poorly defined and difficult to implement that it gave them consulting jobs for life. Much better and easier than actually developing software!