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I’ve been whining about the constant agile-bashing for a while…I understand that implementing agile often leads to the MSDM model (many small death marches) but

I’ve been whining about the constant agile-bashing for a while…I understand that implementing agile often leads to the MSDM model (many small death marches) but I never quite got the loathing agile gets from the tech community. I think this gives me a glimpse. To me, agile is about adjusting your planning so you can get customer feedback and adjust your project accordingly. Without that, much of what I value from agile goes out the window.

nickmyersdt 4y ago
Agile works when everything in your business aligns with it as a way of working. It fails (and therefore is loathed) when the people who need time, focus, room, safety to achieve the outcomes are forced into working with particular processes, procedures or tools in order to satisfy someone other than the team or the customer.
Arcanum-XIII 4y ago
The main problems I’ve seen are: - followed as a religion, especially when it doesn’t make sense (daily stand up for a team working in the same room and collaborating all day long? One day lost every 2 week for planning and review? Trying to do a stand up with too many people?) - using it as an excuse to not prepare the project and without clear objective - trying to fit agile in a fixed schedule (like trying to sync with a big marketing release, complete with pre reserved tv spot 1 year in advance) - not listening to the final customer - heck, not even making sure he’s interested - trying to complexity it by adding a lot of metrics (financial is a big one) - making estimate as the law
- agos 4y ago
  I don't want to say "no true scotsman", but agile has no requirements on stand ups, schedules, or estimates.
  - pydry 4y ago
    Agile has always been extremely vague about what it is. This is at the heart of the problem. This allows everyone to project their own desires on to it - from CEO to PM to programmer to consultant. I get why this happened - the original consultants probably felt that defining it in a way that would alienate people (especially leaders with the budget to hire them) wouldnt be good business. Nonetheless it led to all this. Scrum was almost worse - an attempt to be specific and regimented about process without being alienating which is how I ended up working on a project for BigBank where they asked for N story points to be delivered per month in the contract. Ideally Id like to see some new sort of movement X that follows the heart of what agile is and isnt afraid to get specific in a way that would alienate a CEO/pm with waterfall/controlling tendencies. This way I could ask in a job interview if the companies does X or agile and get a clearer answer about wtf they do.
    - kthejoker2 4y ago
      The manifesto isn't vague. It's an opionated set of criteria preferences for evaluating ways of working (on software.) You can easily uncover in an job interview if they honor those preferences. * How is the customer involved in shaping the software? Give specific examples. * Who decides what will be developed? Where does my role fit in? * Will I be able to ship production code my first week? (Why not?) Et cetera. Even better: come up with your own manifesto of preferences for ways of working. And then score potential employers and your teams against them.
      - pydry 4y ago
        I first realized the problem when somebody hit me with: "The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation." and "Individuals and interactions over processes and tools" to argue that writing code comments, tests and documentation wasnt worth investing in when we can all just talk. This was after a series of disasters that code comments, tests and documentation would all have helped with. It's perhaps hard to imagine that this would be controversial but it was - the fact it was 10 years ago and we were under pressure to deliver can perhaps partly explain why. Try as I might I couldnt argue that his interpretation was wrong. I stared at the words and was shocked when I realized that it was actually perfectly valid. I have my own understanding of "good agile" and no doubt a lot of developers share it after many decades of good experiences and bad experiences and it arguably means putting processes and tools over individuals and interactions some of the time - like using a linter/autoformatter over arguing about formatting. I dont know what we need but probably it looks a lot more like an updated version of the joel score than the vague soft focus angel tinged* crap that is the agile manifesto. For what it's worth, I think your list is also a bit vague. * I swear that the of the agile manifesto web design was also stolen from a baptist church.
- Cederfjard 4y ago
  You can follow agile methodologies while working on a fixed schedule, but if the timeframe isn’t flexible, then the scope needs to be. Fill up the backlog, prioritize it by importance, and what’s done by the deadline is what’ll be delivered. If you get work done reliably and at a consistent pace while tracking velocity or throughput, you can use that data to get an idea of what you’ll manage to deliver.
ownagefool 4y ago
agile is fine. The problem is the brand has been captured by consultants selling something that doesn't jive with the original ethos. You were supposed to talk to the customers. Now you have dedicated POs that determine what the team will work on, but they're also too junior to talk to the customers. It's okay though, you have dedicated PMs that'll talk to the customers, right? Only they're typically to busy pushing a personal agenda to climb the corporate ladder to actually care. It's cool though, we're agile so we can just change the process? Nah, there's now there's extremely prescriptive processes. Heaven forbid you don't find the hour long retrospectives, that you can't action anything from, useful. So basically it boils down to the daily status report which ensures you a) show up on time and b) report on your commitments, and generally being forced to overcommit by committe on really short deadlines, so you can be pressured to work free overtime because apparently its your commitment? Of course, not everyone abuses agile like this. But they don't typically advertise, sell, or even really talk about agile all that much.
- horsawlarway 4y ago
  This roughly matches my experience. In general - I consider "agile/scrum master training" on a resume as a pretty serious black mark, for basically the same reason: The training is all from consultants who preach bs to sell courses and products to management - very rarely does the training encourage simple acts like "talk to your customers" or "let your devs shadow a user" or even "treat your team like people". It's all process over people - the opposite of the intent.
TickleSteve 4y ago
The reality is that as soon as one of your customers has a date as a deadline, everything crystalises behind that into a series of deadlines and hence into waterfall. No real engineering team exists in a vacuum, so more often than not, all Agile processes degrade into waterfall. If you're lucky and you live in a pure software world with no 3rd parties imposing deadline dates on you, great. In my experience, those worlds are few and far between.
- mitchitized 4y ago
  Amen, but forget about external influence - if you work in a business that is profitable, you're certain to bump into coworkers outside of technologies that live in a pure deadline-driven world. That's business, and it is not negotiable. There will always be major events that are locked to fixed dates, like conferences, launches and many things that are impacted by launches (like hiring new teams to be using the new systems that we were supposed to be building). This does not mean this company sucks, or working at this company sucks, it usually means this company is profitable. "Waterfall" is starting to get twisted into some sort of virtue signaling for folks that like to complain about deadlines. Managing this tension is what we all need to be good at - there's definitely no silver bullet or perfect methodology to manage this, because it is always evolving.
doctor_eval 4y ago
The agile manifesto is great. So-called capital-A “Agile” - including the thing that people call Scrum, SaFE, all the other hard coded nonsense - are just turnkey processes, churned out by authors who got lucky, that tend to be implemented as silver bullets, with almost no regard for the actual principles and value of the manifesto from which they draw their name.
- jordanbeiber 4y ago
  Ken Schwaber on SAFE - unsafe at any speed: https://kenschwaber.wordpress.com/2013/08/06/unsafe-at-any-speed/ https://kenschwaber.wordpress.com/2013/08/06/unsafe-at-any-s... > Keep the values, keep the principles, think for yourself. A core premise of agile is that the people doing the work are the people who can best figure out how to do it.
  - doctor_eval 4y ago
    > Values and principles scale, but practices are context sensitive. Brilliant.

nickmyersdt 4y ago

Agile works when everything in your business aligns with it as a way of working. It fails (and therefore is loathed) when the people who need time, focus, room, safety to achieve the outcomes are forced into working with particular processes, procedures or tools in order to satisfy someone other than the team or the customer.

Arcanum-XIII 4y ago

The main problems I’ve seen are: - followed as a religion, especially when it doesn’t make sense (daily stand up for a team working in the same room and collaborating all day long? One day lost every 2 week for planning and review? Trying to do a stand up with too many people?) - using it as an excuse to not prepare the project and without clear objective - trying to fit agile in a fixed schedule (like trying to sync with a big marketing release, complete with pre reserved tv spot 1 year in advance) - not listening to the final customer - heck, not even making sure he’s interested - trying to complexity it by adding a lot of metrics (financial is a big one) - making estimate as the law

agos 4y ago
I don't want to say "no true scotsman", but agile has no requirements on stand ups, schedules, or estimates.
- pydry 4y ago
  Agile has always been extremely vague about what it is. This is at the heart of the problem. This allows everyone to project their own desires on to it - from CEO to PM to programmer to consultant. I get why this happened - the original consultants probably felt that defining it in a way that would alienate people (especially leaders with the budget to hire them) wouldnt be good business. Nonetheless it led to all this. Scrum was almost worse - an attempt to be specific and regimented about process without being alienating which is how I ended up working on a project for BigBank where they asked for N story points to be delivered per month in the contract. Ideally Id like to see some new sort of movement X that follows the heart of what agile is and isnt afraid to get specific in a way that would alienate a CEO/pm with waterfall/controlling tendencies. This way I could ask in a job interview if the companies does X or agile and get a clearer answer about wtf they do.
  - kthejoker2 4y ago
    The manifesto isn't vague. It's an opionated set of criteria preferences for evaluating ways of working (on software.) You can easily uncover in an job interview if they honor those preferences. * How is the customer involved in shaping the software? Give specific examples. * Who decides what will be developed? Where does my role fit in? * Will I be able to ship production code my first week? (Why not?) Et cetera. Even better: come up with your own manifesto of preferences for ways of working. And then score potential employers and your teams against them.
    - pydry 4y ago
      I first realized the problem when somebody hit me with: "The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation." and "Individuals and interactions over processes and tools" to argue that writing code comments, tests and documentation wasnt worth investing in when we can all just talk. This was after a series of disasters that code comments, tests and documentation would all have helped with. It's perhaps hard to imagine that this would be controversial but it was - the fact it was 10 years ago and we were under pressure to deliver can perhaps partly explain why. Try as I might I couldnt argue that his interpretation was wrong. I stared at the words and was shocked when I realized that it was actually perfectly valid. I have my own understanding of "good agile" and no doubt a lot of developers share it after many decades of good experiences and bad experiences and it arguably means putting processes and tools over individuals and interactions some of the time - like using a linter/autoformatter over arguing about formatting. I dont know what we need but probably it looks a lot more like an updated version of the joel score than the vague soft focus angel tinged* crap that is the agile manifesto. For what it's worth, I think your list is also a bit vague. * I swear that the of the agile manifesto web design was also stolen from a baptist church.
Cederfjard 4y ago
You can follow agile methodologies while working on a fixed schedule, but if the timeframe isn’t flexible, then the scope needs to be. Fill up the backlog, prioritize it by importance, and what’s done by the deadline is what’ll be delivered. If you get work done reliably and at a consistent pace while tracking velocity or throughput, you can use that data to get an idea of what you’ll manage to deliver.

ownagefool 4y ago

agile is fine. The problem is the brand has been captured by consultants selling something that doesn't jive with the original ethos. You were supposed to talk to the customers. Now you have dedicated POs that determine what the team will work on, but they're also too junior to talk to the customers. It's okay though, you have dedicated PMs that'll talk to the customers, right? Only they're typically to busy pushing a personal agenda to climb the corporate ladder to actually care. It's cool though, we're agile so we can just change the process? Nah, there's now there's extremely prescriptive processes. Heaven forbid you don't find the hour long retrospectives, that you can't action anything from, useful. So basically it boils down to the daily status report which ensures you a) show up on time and b) report on your commitments, and generally being forced to overcommit by committe on really short deadlines, so you can be pressured to work free overtime because apparently its your commitment? Of course, not everyone abuses agile like this. But they don't typically advertise, sell, or even really talk about agile all that much.

horsawlarway 4y ago
This roughly matches my experience. In general - I consider "agile/scrum master training" on a resume as a pretty serious black mark, for basically the same reason: The training is all from consultants who preach bs to sell courses and products to management - very rarely does the training encourage simple acts like "talk to your customers" or "let your devs shadow a user" or even "treat your team like people". It's all process over people - the opposite of the intent.

TickleSteve 4y ago

The reality is that as soon as one of your customers has a date as a deadline, everything crystalises behind that into a series of deadlines and hence into waterfall. No real engineering team exists in a vacuum, so more often than not, all Agile processes degrade into waterfall. If you're lucky and you live in a pure software world with no 3rd parties imposing deadline dates on you, great. In my experience, those worlds are few and far between.

mitchitized 4y ago
Amen, but forget about external influence - if you work in a business that is profitable, you're certain to bump into coworkers outside of technologies that live in a pure deadline-driven world. That's business, and it is not negotiable. There will always be major events that are locked to fixed dates, like conferences, launches and many things that are impacted by launches (like hiring new teams to be using the new systems that we were supposed to be building). This does not mean this company sucks, or working at this company sucks, it usually means this company is profitable. "Waterfall" is starting to get twisted into some sort of virtue signaling for folks that like to complain about deadlines. Managing this tension is what we all need to be good at - there's definitely no silver bullet or perfect methodology to manage this, because it is always evolving.

doctor_eval 4y ago

The agile manifesto is great. So-called capital-A “Agile” - including the thing that people call Scrum, SaFE, all the other hard coded nonsense - are just turnkey processes, churned out by authors who got lucky, that tend to be implemented as silver bullets, with almost no regard for the actual principles and value of the manifesto from which they draw their name.

jordanbeiber 4y ago
Ken Schwaber on SAFE - unsafe at any speed: https://kenschwaber.wordpress.com/2013/08/06/unsafe-at-any-speed/ https://kenschwaber.wordpress.com/2013/08/06/unsafe-at-any-s... > Keep the values, keep the principles, think for yourself. A core premise of agile is that the people doing the work are the people who can best figure out how to do it.
- doctor_eval 4y ago
  > Values and principles scale, but practices are context sensitive. Brilliant.