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I cut my teeth at a waterfall shop on the software engineering side. In hindsight, what was really killing our productivity wasn't the process but a bunch of du

I cut my teeth at a waterfall shop on the software engineering side. In hindsight, what was really killing our productivity wasn't the process but a bunch of dumb politics in the org. I'm not sure Agile/Scrum could've saved them from that. With that said I totally get why designers hate Agile - it forces them to make design decisions they're not ready to make and once there's functional software in people's hands everyone groans when design suggests non-feature changes.

kcplate 4y ago
> wasn't the process but a bunch of dumb politics in the org. I'm not sure Agile/Scrum could've saved them from that. In my experience agile/scrum just adds to the politics within the org. It’s a bloody religion. Agile adds in agile zealots vs the infidels.
hinkley 4y ago
I don't know about anybody else but for me the private conversations about agile have shifted substantially over the last 20 years. Early on, and once in a great while since, the conversation is that Agile is just a flashlight, or a mirror. All of those dumb politic things get no pushback until the bitter end of the project when everyone is trying desperately to ship it before the board gets pissed off enough to start rolling heads. Then you get some death bed conversions that don't really change the fact that the real change was needed six months ago and now it's all going to be bailing wire and masking tape. The fast feedback loop makes the bullshit quite apparent early on. And if you're very careful, you can arrange for some of the features that never should have been agreed to in the first place to be at the end of the line, where you can say, "look, we can ship what we have now, which does most of what most people wanted it to do, or we can keep farting around with this for another three months". A big part of where this breaks down is that you have two groups, one of which hates to change and one of which has had to become more comfortable/resigned to it, and if you put them both in the same pressure cooker, group A is still going to evolve slower than group B, except now group B has concrete evidence about what a group of children group A is. Now both sides are looking in the mirror and neither of them like what they see. The problem with knowledge is that once you have it, it's hard to go back, even if you don't like what you know. So I'm not sure what the road out of this is, other than the ones that sort of already exist, like OSS, which creates little pockets of what should be sanity (but often are just a different flavor of crazy).

kcplate 4y ago

> wasn't the process but a bunch of dumb politics in the org. I'm not sure Agile/Scrum could've saved them from that. In my experience agile/scrum just adds to the politics within the org. It’s a bloody religion. Agile adds in agile zealots vs the infidels.

hinkley 4y ago

I don't know about anybody else but for me the private conversations about agile have shifted substantially over the last 20 years. Early on, and once in a great while since, the conversation is that Agile is just a flashlight, or a mirror. All of those dumb politic things get no pushback until the bitter end of the project when everyone is trying desperately to ship it before the board gets pissed off enough to start rolling heads. Then you get some death bed conversions that don't really change the fact that the real change was needed six months ago and now it's all going to be bailing wire and masking tape. The fast feedback loop makes the bullshit quite apparent early on. And if you're very careful, you can arrange for some of the features that never should have been agreed to in the first place to be at the end of the line, where you can say, "look, we can ship what we have now, which does most of what most people wanted it to do, or we can keep farting around with this for another three months". A big part of where this breaks down is that you have two groups, one of which hates to change and one of which has had to become more comfortable/resigned to it, and if you put them both in the same pressure cooker, group A is still going to evolve slower than group B, except now group B has concrete evidence about what a group of children group A is. Now both sides are looking in the mirror and neither of them like what they see. The problem with knowledge is that once you have it, it's hard to go back, even if you don't like what you know. So I'm not sure what the road out of this is, other than the ones that sort of already exist, like OSS, which creates little pockets of what should be sanity (but often are just a different flavor of crazy).