3 ms·

I’ve worked at a lot of places that said they do Agile but they all really do waterfall with Kanban and call it Agile. Sometimes they do retros too. If you’re

by nusl 3y ago

I’ve worked at a lot of places that said they do Agile but they all really do waterfall with Kanban and call it Agile. Sometimes they do retros too. If you’re someone that studied Agile and knows how it really works I think you’re in the vast minority. Admittedly I am not one of those people and haven’t a clue of what “real” Agile looks like. I can’t say that I feel like I’m missing out either. Where did the word Spike come from? How does it mean “research” (kinda)? Dunno, I’ll google that now I guess. But the word itself feels out of place if you’re not in the Agile mindset. Seems like it’s from track running terminology for a short, quick sprint. Okay. Why not just call it what it is, just research and/or planning?

psunavy03 3y ago
Because a spike was supposed to originally represent a short, quick, narrow trip through all levels of the stack from UI to DB to figure out how to approach a given gnarly problem. Narrow and deep . . . looks like a spike.
jokethrowaway 3y ago
That's true. Almost nobody knows the principle behind agile. And almost nobody does full scrum either. https://agilemanifesto.org/ https://agilemanifesto.org/ Read this and you'll know agile in 5m. Forget all the buzzwords. You won't know scrum or any other monstrosity call agile today, but that's not agile.
- sureglymop 3y ago
  The scrum guide is also like 16 pages, pretty simple and anyone could read and understand it in 20 minutes. What's surprising to me is, these processes are actually well defined. But my suspicion is that that's not what sells. No "aspiring manager" will take the "scrum class" if it's ideas are really pretty simple and not that revolutionary and hard to understand. I have come across so many managers who have had a vague idea seemingly from a few youtube videos (or perhaps a class they took) but they seemingly never had researched in the same way software engineers e.g. read API documentation. The same is true for the waterfall model too these days though. If you fully put in the time and actually research these things as am engineer, a lot of managers will feel threatened and stop that in its tracks.
  - nusl 3y ago
    I've seen this. I interviewed at a place that said they implemented "extreme ownership; it's from a book by some army guy." But they had never read the book or knew the guy's name, or really knew how to explain extreme ownership. But what they told me was that if you do some work you're on the hook if it fails, which is, IMO, pretty normal. Extreme ownership is a whole different beast. That kinda told me enough about senior leadership to decline.

by nusl 3y ago

psunavy03 3y ago

Because a spike was supposed to originally represent a short, quick, narrow trip through all levels of the stack from UI to DB to figure out how to approach a given gnarly problem. Narrow and deep . . . looks like a spike.

jokethrowaway 3y ago

That's true. Almost nobody knows the principle behind agile. And almost nobody does full scrum either. https://agilemanifesto.org/ https://agilemanifesto.org/ Read this and you'll know agile in 5m. Forget all the buzzwords. You won't know scrum or any other monstrosity call agile today, but that's not agile.

sureglymop 3y ago
The scrum guide is also like 16 pages, pretty simple and anyone could read and understand it in 20 minutes. What's surprising to me is, these processes are actually well defined. But my suspicion is that that's not what sells. No "aspiring manager" will take the "scrum class" if it's ideas are really pretty simple and not that revolutionary and hard to understand. I have come across so many managers who have had a vague idea seemingly from a few youtube videos (or perhaps a class they took) but they seemingly never had researched in the same way software engineers e.g. read API documentation. The same is true for the waterfall model too these days though. If you fully put in the time and actually research these things as am engineer, a lot of managers will feel threatened and stop that in its tracks.
- nusl 3y ago
  I've seen this. I interviewed at a place that said they implemented "extreme ownership; it's from a book by some army guy." But they had never read the book or knew the guy's name, or really knew how to explain extreme ownership. But what they told me was that if you do some work you're on the hook if it fails, which is, IMO, pretty normal. Extreme ownership is a whole different beast. That kinda told me enough about senior leadership to decline.