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It was going so well until it turned into “old white men created Agile and they don’t understand POC’s and women”. The ‘weirdos’ in the first paragraphs were p

It was going so well until it turned into “old white men created Agile and they don’t understand POC’s and women”. The ‘weirdos’ in the first paragraphs were primarily nerdy men. The landscape has changed tremendously since then - Agile is terrible for many things, but it does not incite racism or bias. Perhaps the only bad thing it does not do. I was hoping for a better ending to this read.

mr90210 4y ago
I am African, and I cringe hard whenever somebody refers to a group of people by their skin feature, regardless of where they come from. I personally don’t think it’s ok to refer to a person like that, it’s a rather gross oversimplification of a human being. We ought to be more sophisticated than that.
- odshoifsdhfs 4y ago
  No, you don't understand (/s), now he is in the 'in group' and gets brownie points, and because he used that logic, you can't criticise him or you are a racist/something other.
- discreteevent 4y ago
  "The mind is the standard of the man" - Martin Luther King. (Just in case: in those days 'man' meant 'human')
  - bitwize 4y ago
    Also Martin Luther King: "A society that has for 300 years done something special against the Negro must now do something special for the Negro."
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - np- 4y ago
      This is completely out of context. He said that before civil rights were realized, and Black Americans were regularly structurally discriminated against. The special thing that needed to be done was to not let things remain the status quo but to allow Black people to become full members of society.
- planarhobbit 4y ago
  I love it when people who have no idea about our profession start doing this race baiting bullshit. I’m really hoping (too optimistic, I know) that HN will collectively one day start flagging articles written by clueless people who spend an awful lot of words to say less than nothing. Embarrassing.
mr90210 4y ago
Talking about agile, I subscribe the ideas from Allen Holub (holub.com), especially because he doesn’t talk about a one-size fit all formula, instead he focuses in collaboration between peers, and short feedback cycles aiming to solve business challenges.
nonstickcoating 4y ago
I do not think the article argues that Agile somehow incites racism and bias, it argues that it doesn't account for them while it should.
- asplake 4y ago
  Agile's crisis (which is real) is because despite the generativity of the manifesto, the frameworks it spawned largely ignore how change happens in a healthy and sustainable way. It is deeply ironic how much the Agile industry leans into 1990's models of change (solution-driven, imposed, etc). That explains an awful lot. When people think that it's enough that they're right, bad things happen. Agile doesn't actually need a theory of society to understand that, just a little humility.
  - nradov 4y ago
    The Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) includes review and change cycles driven by teams at the grass roots level. Of course some organizations skip that part, but you can't blame agile frameworks for management choices.
    - asplake 4y ago
      Every framework has some kind of inspect-and-adapt thing going, nothing special about SAFe in that regard. The bigger question is how the organisation is supposed to get from zero (not using the framework) to the point where it is working at every scale, necessary if claims of business agility etc are to be realised. If the answer is a rollout project, then the dissonance there (not to mention the pain) should not be underestimated.
      - nradov 4y ago
        Organizations starting from zero typically hire experienced trainers and consultants to guide them through the initial implementation and then a few cycles. That's expensive, but cheaper than failing. Of course if senior leadership isn't truly committed then it still won't work, but that's not the fault of the framework.
meerita 4y ago
It's the gender and race wars agenda. Everything has to have a gender/race problem.
- pif 4y ago
  No, it's short-sighted people from US not realising that the internet is broader than the US. Please, if you are writing an US-centric article, state it in the title. Example: "Agile and the Long Crisis of Software in the USA".
  - tjpnz 4y ago
    Having spent the better part of a decade working with agile teams in Asia I too find such statements to be decidedly off. My Scrum masters have all been POC and mostly female.
  - meerita 4y ago
    Indeed. But I remember the race/gender thing was inexistent, nobody cared if a programming language is race biased or gender biased. Those are first-world woke problems. Solving those problems will not solve the entire topic. People focus more on external issues with 0 correlation instead of the main topic. It's logic that we need to apply to solve problems, not feelings.
piva00 4y ago
Agile as per the Agile Manifesto isn't bad. At all. I saw the transition of the industry from a complete waterfall process to the overhyping of agile, the pushback and now the land where agile as per the manifesto is more-or-less a given. The old ways were so much worse... The bad sprouts from agile are the multitude of processes and bullshit methodologies that tried to ride the hype and create "The Agile Way". Scrum and others are a side-effect of this and I'm very glad to see Scrum being shunned for the past 4-6 years and instead engineers being attracted towards much more lightweight processes. The problem with agile is that it only works when people had experiences, bad and good, and a team can tailor how their agile process should look like given their constraints. Throwing a bunch of juniors under an agile methodology and telling them what's right or not only creates friction and useless rituals, you need experienced people (PMs, EMs and at least one engineer) to cut the bullshit and stick to the points that matter: collaboration, communication, re-assessment of priorities, etc.
- pydry 4y ago
  It's vague as hell though. Everybody from the agile consultants to the CEO down to the lowliest engineer projected their desires and intrinsic meaning on to the agile manifesto. If you ask 10 people what agile "really" means you'll get 10 different answers, many quite incompatible with each other.
  - cestith 4y ago
    Agile focuses on the continuous improvement of not just the software, but the process. They tried to be specifically not too verbose, as dedication to one size and shape of process that does not fit all is precisely what they were against. Agile can be thought of as a meta-process. It's an attitude and a process for improving your process. Think kaizen for your software development team. It's about the tight feedback loop about what's working, what's not working, and what can be improved. Beyond that, 10 people might find that the processes they've refined from Agile really do differ. That might be because of differing (and broken) application of Agile itself, which is a common claim. It might be, though, that continuous improvement of process has lead different teams in different directions that function well or well enough for those teams.
wodenokoto 4y ago
I felt like the justification for saying that agile was not good for underrepresented groups came very late, but it is there and it actually is not a bad argument. > We’ve long known that eliminating bureaucracy, hierarchy, and documentation feels great, until you’re the person who needs rules for protection. I think the article eventually makes good arguments for this, at least if you are willing to say that code review and pair programming are things that spring out of the spirit of the manifesto. Basically they author is claiming that the goal of the agile manifesto is to remove oversight from developers so that they can focus on "the project". The downside is that you are losing oversight of bad behaviour, which gives space for work-place bullying. (and the other downside argued is that developers, who are also stakeholders, do not have a voice in questioning the utility of the project overall).
- r_c_a_d 4y ago
  I never read it as "removing oversight", more like "removing excessive admin". And it explicitly says to value "individuals and interactions". Part of that means you need a facilitator in retrospectives who can detect conflicts between individuals which may not be being addressed in that forum - and ensure that they are addressed elsewhere.
richliss 4y ago
95% of articles on Agile are incorrect and this is no different. 1. Mike (Miguel) Beedle was latino. 2. "Al Tenhundfeld, one of the manifesto’s authors" - NOPE. I could go on but what's the point. If you want to learn about agile I recommend reading Alistair Cockburn, James Coplien and Craig Larman. They're old school and know the history of this stuff amazingly well.
bitwize 4y ago
We are in an era of mythologizing that old white men are at the root of all problems, so thinkpieces like this have to mention old white men as a matter of course. That said, however, the article is correct to assert that Agile, as implemented in real organizations, addresses the corporation's needs and only those needs. Otherwise, it wouldn't have been adopted at all, but dismissed as the snivelings of whiny insubordinate programmers who forgot just who signs the checks.
- throwaway6532 4y ago
  >We are in an era of mythologizing that old white men are at the root of all problems, so thinkpieces like this have to mention old white men as a matter of course. That we've gotten to this point must also be old white men's fault.
  - bitwize 4y ago
    When you boil it down, it probably is. I don't believe for a moment that the reason why Occupy was scuppered by social justice stuff has nothing to do with the fact that the sort of person who attends the WEF was very threatened by Occupy.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

mr90210 4y ago

I am African, and I cringe hard whenever somebody refers to a group of people by their skin feature, regardless of where they come from. I personally don’t think it’s ok to refer to a person like that, it’s a rather gross oversimplification of a human being. We ought to be more sophisticated than that.

odshoifsdhfs 4y ago
No, you don't understand (/s), now he is in the 'in group' and gets brownie points, and because he used that logic, you can't criticise him or you are a racist/something other.
discreteevent 4y ago
"The mind is the standard of the man" - Martin Luther King. (Just in case: in those days 'man' meant 'human')
- bitwize 4y ago
  Also Martin Luther King: "A society that has for 300 years done something special against the Negro must now do something special for the Negro."
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - np- 4y ago
    This is completely out of context. He said that before civil rights were realized, and Black Americans were regularly structurally discriminated against. The special thing that needed to be done was to not let things remain the status quo but to allow Black people to become full members of society.
planarhobbit 4y ago
I love it when people who have no idea about our profession start doing this race baiting bullshit. I’m really hoping (too optimistic, I know) that HN will collectively one day start flagging articles written by clueless people who spend an awful lot of words to say less than nothing. Embarrassing.

mr90210 4y ago

Talking about agile, I subscribe the ideas from Allen Holub (holub.com), especially because he doesn’t talk about a one-size fit all formula, instead he focuses in collaboration between peers, and short feedback cycles aiming to solve business challenges.

nonstickcoating 4y ago

I do not think the article argues that Agile somehow incites racism and bias, it argues that it doesn't account for them while it should.

asplake 4y ago
Agile's crisis (which is real) is because despite the generativity of the manifesto, the frameworks it spawned largely ignore how change happens in a healthy and sustainable way. It is deeply ironic how much the Agile industry leans into 1990's models of change (solution-driven, imposed, etc). That explains an awful lot. When people think that it's enough that they're right, bad things happen. Agile doesn't actually need a theory of society to understand that, just a little humility.
- nradov 4y ago
  The Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) includes review and change cycles driven by teams at the grass roots level. Of course some organizations skip that part, but you can't blame agile frameworks for management choices.
  - asplake 4y ago
    Every framework has some kind of inspect-and-adapt thing going, nothing special about SAFe in that regard. The bigger question is how the organisation is supposed to get from zero (not using the framework) to the point where it is working at every scale, necessary if claims of business agility etc are to be realised. If the answer is a rollout project, then the dissonance there (not to mention the pain) should not be underestimated.
    - nradov 4y ago
      Organizations starting from zero typically hire experienced trainers and consultants to guide them through the initial implementation and then a few cycles. That's expensive, but cheaper than failing. Of course if senior leadership isn't truly committed then it still won't work, but that's not the fault of the framework.

meerita 4y ago

It's the gender and race wars agenda. Everything has to have a gender/race problem.

pif 4y ago
No, it's short-sighted people from US not realising that the internet is broader than the US. Please, if you are writing an US-centric article, state it in the title. Example: "Agile and the Long Crisis of Software in the USA".
- tjpnz 4y ago
  Having spent the better part of a decade working with agile teams in Asia I too find such statements to be decidedly off. My Scrum masters have all been POC and mostly female.
- meerita 4y ago
  Indeed. But I remember the race/gender thing was inexistent, nobody cared if a programming language is race biased or gender biased. Those are first-world woke problems. Solving those problems will not solve the entire topic. People focus more on external issues with 0 correlation instead of the main topic. It's logic that we need to apply to solve problems, not feelings.

piva00 4y ago

Agile as per the Agile Manifesto isn't bad. At all. I saw the transition of the industry from a complete waterfall process to the overhyping of agile, the pushback and now the land where agile as per the manifesto is more-or-less a given. The old ways were so much worse... The bad sprouts from agile are the multitude of processes and bullshit methodologies that tried to ride the hype and create "The Agile Way". Scrum and others are a side-effect of this and I'm very glad to see Scrum being shunned for the past 4-6 years and instead engineers being attracted towards much more lightweight processes. The problem with agile is that it only works when people had experiences, bad and good, and a team can tailor how their agile process should look like given their constraints. Throwing a bunch of juniors under an agile methodology and telling them what's right or not only creates friction and useless rituals, you need experienced people (PMs, EMs and at least one engineer) to cut the bullshit and stick to the points that matter: collaboration, communication, re-assessment of priorities, etc.

pydry 4y ago
It's vague as hell though. Everybody from the agile consultants to the CEO down to the lowliest engineer projected their desires and intrinsic meaning on to the agile manifesto. If you ask 10 people what agile "really" means you'll get 10 different answers, many quite incompatible with each other.
- cestith 4y ago
  Agile focuses on the continuous improvement of not just the software, but the process. They tried to be specifically not too verbose, as dedication to one size and shape of process that does not fit all is precisely what they were against. Agile can be thought of as a meta-process. It's an attitude and a process for improving your process. Think kaizen for your software development team. It's about the tight feedback loop about what's working, what's not working, and what can be improved. Beyond that, 10 people might find that the processes they've refined from Agile really do differ. That might be because of differing (and broken) application of Agile itself, which is a common claim. It might be, though, that continuous improvement of process has lead different teams in different directions that function well or well enough for those teams.

wodenokoto 4y ago

I felt like the justification for saying that agile was not good for underrepresented groups came very late, but it is there and it actually is not a bad argument. > We’ve long known that eliminating bureaucracy, hierarchy, and documentation feels great, until you’re the person who needs rules for protection. I think the article eventually makes good arguments for this, at least if you are willing to say that code review and pair programming are things that spring out of the spirit of the manifesto. Basically they author is claiming that the goal of the agile manifesto is to remove oversight from developers so that they can focus on "the project". The downside is that you are losing oversight of bad behaviour, which gives space for work-place bullying. (and the other downside argued is that developers, who are also stakeholders, do not have a voice in questioning the utility of the project overall).

r_c_a_d 4y ago
I never read it as "removing oversight", more like "removing excessive admin". And it explicitly says to value "individuals and interactions". Part of that means you need a facilitator in retrospectives who can detect conflicts between individuals which may not be being addressed in that forum - and ensure that they are addressed elsewhere.

richliss 4y ago

95% of articles on Agile are incorrect and this is no different. 1. Mike (Miguel) Beedle was latino. 2. "Al Tenhundfeld, one of the manifesto’s authors" - NOPE. I could go on but what's the point. If you want to learn about agile I recommend reading Alistair Cockburn, James Coplien and Craig Larman. They're old school and know the history of this stuff amazingly well.

bitwize 4y ago

We are in an era of mythologizing that old white men are at the root of all problems, so thinkpieces like this have to mention old white men as a matter of course. That said, however, the article is correct to assert that Agile, as implemented in real organizations, addresses the corporation's needs and only those needs. Otherwise, it wouldn't have been adopted at all, but dismissed as the snivelings of whiny insubordinate programmers who forgot just who signs the checks.

throwaway6532 4y ago
>We are in an era of mythologizing that old white men are at the root of all problems, so thinkpieces like this have to mention old white men as a matter of course. That we've gotten to this point must also be old white men's fault.
- bitwize 4y ago
  When you boil it down, it probably is. I don't believe for a moment that the reason why Occupy was scuppered by social justice stuff has nothing to do with the fact that the sort of person who attends the WEF was very threatened by Occupy.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]