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Beck had this process (test, code, refactor) in place in his original eXtreme Programming book, which helped spawn the whole “agile” movement. It’s kind of cool

Beck had this process (test, code, refactor) in place in his original eXtreme Programming book, which helped spawn the whole “agile” movement. It’s kind of cool to see how the process was refined over time. It’s also sad to see how twisted people’s idea of both agile and tdd have become, usually because they never read the source material.

switchbak 4y ago
Having been involved in that world from pretty early on, I must admit I'm pretty appalled at the odd interpretations I get both on HN an in real life. I'm not sure where to put the blame, but "Agile" does get a particularly bad rap these days. Mostly I'd say a corporate watering down of Agile concepts, money hungry consultants who didn't know much, and I h ave a personal dislike of how most of SCRUM tends to be implemented. TDD in particular has fallen off the map in a way that I find very surprising. Generational amnesia I suppose.
- mpweiher 4y ago
  > corporate watering down of Agile concepts I think inverting agile concepts is more accurate.
  - Jtsummers 4y ago
    It's very common. When I was working at a USAF base they decided to adopt Lean. What they actually implemented was almost the exact opposite of Lean in every way, almost comically so. A key element of Lean is empowering the workers to improve the processes. Let them come up with ideas that improve things and run experiments (guided by management perhaps, but not directed by). But the way USAF did it, the managers would watch a process being done, identify "wasted" movement, and then rewrite the process/procedures to eliminate that wasted movement. It was clearly just Scientific Management but being called Lean because they "leaned out" the processes. Naturally, the actual workers did not like coming in every other week and having to learn their job all over again. After a while they still held "Lean Events" but by then it was for show rather than to actually effect change in how things were done.
  - evil-olive 4y ago
    I once interviewed at a place that told me they did "design sprints", "coding sprints", "integration sprints", and "testing sprints"
  - Gibbon1 4y ago
    Corporate agile looks from a distance like waterfall in a dress if you get my drift.
    - smaudet 4y ago
      Once the scrum "masters" start becoming unspoken management, then you know the process has got off the rails and is no longer agile. Sometimes it makes sense, corps don't actually have any need to churn out new features, at that point you just have kanban, or even waterfall. Be nice to stop pretending, though.
- dccoolgai 4y ago
  Agile is a lot like Communism: there's a lot of people who swear it works great but everywhere it seems to have been tried it hasn't gone well... And the apologists just insist "those places didn't understand it and do it right".
  - throwawaymaths 4y ago
    There's a bias there, I think there are a lot of small shops where agile works great and you mostly hear about big shops that use it where it will never work great because you probably don't care that much about SmallTechCo. Versus communism where people (e.g. Benjamin Tucker) were predicting its primary failure mode decades before it ever was instantiated at any scale.
    - Jtsummers 4y ago
      Small shops have a benefit of freedom of choice that large corps often don't give to workers. Sometimes it's accidental, sometimes deliberate, but large corporations have a tendency to want a single defined process. Variation (or as they'd call it "deviation") from that process is bad (it's not, but from the corporate management perspective it is). It has to be justified, you have to prove the thing you want to do will work before you can even try it to demonstrate that it does or does not work. This hinders freedom to experiment with new techniques and methods within development teams, but it doesn't stop it. A "trick" is to provide all the artifacts that they want as if you followed their process to the letter, but still do things the way you want so long as it gets the job done. The problem with that is that you have no evidence you did things differently than the defined process and so they'll continue to believe the defined process is perfectly fine, if not excellent. Then some exec will decide to write a book about it and become a consultant selling the (broken) defined process (I assume this is how SAFe came to be, an ironically very rigid "agile" process).
      - throwawaymaths 4y ago
        Excellent points.
      - 4y ago
- throwawaymaths 4y ago
  I mean we should get used to this kind of stuff and just accept that Agile means "corporate agile" and just call classical agile that. Just like how OOP today means "like c++" and not whatever smalltalk is.

switchbak 4y ago

Having been involved in that world from pretty early on, I must admit I'm pretty appalled at the odd interpretations I get both on HN an in real life. I'm not sure where to put the blame, but "Agile" does get a particularly bad rap these days. Mostly I'd say a corporate watering down of Agile concepts, money hungry consultants who didn't know much, and I h ave a personal dislike of how most of SCRUM tends to be implemented. TDD in particular has fallen off the map in a way that I find very surprising. Generational amnesia I suppose.

mpweiher 4y ago
> corporate watering down of Agile concepts I think inverting agile concepts is more accurate.
- Jtsummers 4y ago
  It's very common. When I was working at a USAF base they decided to adopt Lean. What they actually implemented was almost the exact opposite of Lean in every way, almost comically so. A key element of Lean is empowering the workers to improve the processes. Let them come up with ideas that improve things and run experiments (guided by management perhaps, but not directed by). But the way USAF did it, the managers would watch a process being done, identify "wasted" movement, and then rewrite the process/procedures to eliminate that wasted movement. It was clearly just Scientific Management but being called Lean because they "leaned out" the processes. Naturally, the actual workers did not like coming in every other week and having to learn their job all over again. After a while they still held "Lean Events" but by then it was for show rather than to actually effect change in how things were done.
- evil-olive 4y ago
  I once interviewed at a place that told me they did "design sprints", "coding sprints", "integration sprints", and "testing sprints"
- Gibbon1 4y ago
  Corporate agile looks from a distance like waterfall in a dress if you get my drift.
  - smaudet 4y ago
    Once the scrum "masters" start becoming unspoken management, then you know the process has got off the rails and is no longer agile. Sometimes it makes sense, corps don't actually have any need to churn out new features, at that point you just have kanban, or even waterfall. Be nice to stop pretending, though.
dccoolgai 4y ago
Agile is a lot like Communism: there's a lot of people who swear it works great but everywhere it seems to have been tried it hasn't gone well... And the apologists just insist "those places didn't understand it and do it right".
- throwawaymaths 4y ago
  There's a bias there, I think there are a lot of small shops where agile works great and you mostly hear about big shops that use it where it will never work great because you probably don't care that much about SmallTechCo. Versus communism where people (e.g. Benjamin Tucker) were predicting its primary failure mode decades before it ever was instantiated at any scale.
  - Jtsummers 4y ago
    Small shops have a benefit of freedom of choice that large corps often don't give to workers. Sometimes it's accidental, sometimes deliberate, but large corporations have a tendency to want a single defined process. Variation (or as they'd call it "deviation") from that process is bad (it's not, but from the corporate management perspective it is). It has to be justified, you have to prove the thing you want to do will work before you can even try it to demonstrate that it does or does not work. This hinders freedom to experiment with new techniques and methods within development teams, but it doesn't stop it. A "trick" is to provide all the artifacts that they want as if you followed their process to the letter, but still do things the way you want so long as it gets the job done. The problem with that is that you have no evidence you did things differently than the defined process and so they'll continue to believe the defined process is perfectly fine, if not excellent. Then some exec will decide to write a book about it and become a consultant selling the (broken) defined process (I assume this is how SAFe came to be, an ironically very rigid "agile" process).
    - throwawaymaths 4y ago
      Excellent points.
    - 4y ago
throwawaymaths 4y ago
I mean we should get used to this kind of stuff and just accept that Agile means "corporate agile" and just call classical agile that. Just like how OOP today means "like c++" and not whatever smalltalk is.