8 ms·

The Slow, Painful Death of Agile and Jira

104 points by thecosas 2y ago

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
zug_zug 2y ago
Meh, I get people hate Jira, but every time I ask people "What would you rather do instead" there's absolutely no agreement on what's a better solution. I think it's imoprtant to recognize that if a whole crowd of people say "We hate X" but everybody in that crowd hates eachothers proposals even more, it just creates a facade of agreement where there is none.
- pavel_lishin 2y ago
  "I hate that we eat a bowl of feces every day, can we switch to something else? "I want steak!" "I want salad!" "I want fish!" "Alright, well, there's absolutely no agreement, let's stick with the feces."
  - Arubis 2y ago
    Same point I'm trying to make, but you _absolutely_ win on effect. Well put!
  - m_rpn 2y ago
    Best comment of 2024, maybe even 2025 just on trust.
    - pavel_lishin 2y ago
      Don't give me that sort of trust, I'm sure I'll find some way to milkshake duck myself.
  - zug_zug 2y ago
    I feel like maybe you're intentionally misunderstanding the point I'm making, because your example kind of illustrates my point: In that case you'd probably find nearly 100% agreement on steak over feces, or salad over feces, or fish over feces. You'd have complete agreement on any alternative to feces. But if you read this thread, it's actually full of people actually saying "I was forced to use [alternative tool] and I prefer Jira". There is no tool that has 100% support over Jira. In fact I'd be surprised if there's a single alternantive to Jira that even 40% of people agree is better.
  - darepublic 2y ago
    I once worked with a surly backend developer at a company where for whatever reason the relationship between front and backend was quite poor. One day we were sitting in a long boring meeting and this guy told a story about how his children learned to talk with one another in preschool. The point was we had failed to achieve what the toddlers had, and this comment garnered a big round of laughs. Later on I filed a bug ticket with backend that was legit and this same developer acknowledged it as such. Then what happened was he and the other backend devs made the endpoint completely non-functional, removing even the workaround I had been using. The ticket stayed in limbo until they got back to me and basically said they could return it to its original buggy state or "explore" the matter further. Not keen on more passive aggressive shenanigans I said just return it back to original form. All this to say that.. making a fun joke that obscures the actual complexity of the problem is a sure way to score points with thoughtless buffoons, but it doesn't mean you aren't a hypocritical jerk and that you're mostly wrong.
- Arubis 2y ago
  How about "figure out different solutions that work better for different teams instead of force-fitting everything from three-person startups to enterprise organizations into the same straitjacket of a framework"?
  - badgersnake 2y ago
    I think you just described SOC2, which your dumb-as-fuck customers will insist you do anyway because their even-dumber-than-that customers insist on it.
  - tourmalinetaco 2y ago
    Do programmers not end up taking any management courses? Because we learned of contingency theory within the first month of the semester when I was in college.
- otteromkram 2y ago
  They probably hate Jira for the UI/UX or something similar. I've worked at places that tried to do project management via worksheets and it's quite a challenge to keep those up-to-date, much less add dynamic connections to different repos for updates, adding new stories/tasks, etc. Jira is a godsend by comparison.
  - baal80spam 2y ago
    I remember MS Project. Those were the days...
  - datavirtue 2y ago
    I just left a place that had three different tracking tools that devs had to update, with the Azure boards being customized with all kinds of unrelated 9001 process fuckery that necessitated failing to save any update ever until you dug out the field that was missing. The fields changed on each move across the board. Unsurprisingly, they were planning a project to introduce another tool on top of it all. Pretty much just bike shedding the company into the ground.
- cacois 2y ago
  But it indicates that something is really wrong, right? And that we should all keep noticing that and keep working on a solution? I think the negative responses are directed at the use of "meh" and the seeming indifference to an actual problem that could really use a solution, even if we don't have a perfect one everybody agrees on yet.
- taylodl 2y ago
  Isn't that the point though? Should there be an alternative we all agree on? All our situations are different. The whole point of being agile was to not take a one-size-fits-all approach to solution development.
- miuramxciii 2y ago
  I think Jira is in there just because it is the most used tool. Pick and choose any other tool, if the mindset with the new tool is the same, then we are in the same spot. The point is that all the prescribed rules pushed down the throat of developers. (e.g. You must have a daily stand up. You must have a story that is no bigger than x Points, you must NEVER roll in our out stories into a sprint once it starts.. and the list goes on and on..The rules - no matter how "small" they are, they are still a big barrier to being agile in the truth sense of the word. The above are only my observation and my thouhgts, your mile may vary.
- bbatha 2y ago
  This is a defeatist attitude. There are plenty of jira alternatives that have fewer problems. There are obvious problems with jira that have gone unaddressed for years. For instance performance is horrendous. I would also remove infinite customization. It’s a sales pitch to executives but doesn’t benefit line managers or people working on tickets. For my money Linear is just about perfect.
- tourmalinetaco 2y ago
  Every individual, and on a broader perspective every group, has innate preferences to different forms of organization. It‘s called contingency theory. Agile fails because it was a form of adaptive organization, built out of the highly adaptive/performant cultures of software development, that was never able to be scaled like they tried. In major part because it lost the adaptive aspects in the hard-coded systems, and created unproductive busywork because people were too busy putting something on the board, rather than focusing on work.
louwrentius 2y ago
Link that does not require Medium account: https://archive.is/NYtYD https://archive.is/NYtYD
taylodl 2y ago
Agile isn't agile when it becomes a proscribed methodology complete with tooling as it violates the final point of the Agile Manifesto: Responding to change over following a plan The whole point was to be agile enough to work in a manner that's most effective your team and organization - and even that may change on a project-by-project bases if different stakeholders are involved.
- brightball 2y ago
  Yep. The issue has never been "Agile" the issue has always been a desire for command and control, leading to a bunch of "sounds good" ideas with lots of side effects. There's no scope creep with agile, only responding to feedback.
- SideburnsOfDoom 2y ago
  There are two methodology that are both called "Agile". They are very different, even opposite to each other. The one you will find in the Agile Manifesto and related writings. e.g. "Individuals and interactions over processes and tools" The other is a top-down, upfront-planned, tool based, process heavy corporate method of task-based micromanagement. Usually in Jira. There would be no point in killing Jira, as the management that wants what it does, would simply find a similar equivalent.
- manifoldgeo 2y ago
  I don't mean this in a snarky way, more just to inform: proscribed actually means forbidden unlike the word prescribed, which means recommended.
  - binary132 2y ago
    I wanted to leave this comment, but now I’m going to have to leave a helpful correction to your comment instead: prescribed is closer to “forced”, or “made the rule”, than to “recommended”. :)
- makeitdouble 2y ago
  TBF, while the Agile Manifesto really truck a cord, it wasn't saying anything concrete (talk to each other, collaborate, be flexible, react to reality etc.), that of course by design. So any actual working system can be stamped as "not agile" as surely there will be some aspect that is not perfect. My favorite was "Customer collaboration over contract negotiation": a contract is there to protect both parties, so of course it will be central to a project and people will preferably stick to it, even adjust it when it doesn't fit the bill anymore. So in any case where things go wrong for whatever reason, we can inevitably say more collaboration was needed and that Agile principle wasn't respected. That probably comes from the same sentiment as parents telling their kid to not fall from their bike, it's in human nature.
wg0 2y ago
> The World Doesn’t Need More Features Whereas a PM's job is all about that. We have bloated products. Mostly. Feature packed with FOMO. Incoherent. Inconsistent. Incompatible. But features.
- baal80spam 2y ago
  Exactly. PMs motto seems to be: You will have more features and you _will_ like it!
- fmbb 2y ago
  Coincidentally it seems the reason Jira is a mess is that it has too many PMs chasing too many features. Maybe this was the point of the linked text but I could not get past the paywall. If it was just a board with cards with text it would probably be quite usable.
major505 2y ago
Jira isnt agile. IS just bloeatware. If you need more than a board, and maybe some notifications, you are doing it wrong.
- PTOB 2y ago
  I appreciate how you added an extra letter to "bloat". It's like visual onomatopoeia.
mattbrewsbytes 2y ago
Agile is not supposed to make development faster. The core element of being agile (small "a") is to avoid doing work that results in features that are hardly used, not needed, etc. In lean terminology this is called eliminating waste in a process. Smaller iterations of deliverable work prevents a big up front design and putting in features including UI designs, software designs, coding, tests, QA testing, etc. and then it doesn't get used or has minimal ROI. JIRA sucks. If you think your issues with delivery are tied to your work tracking system then you're looking at the wrong things.
- m_rpn 2y ago
  Less waste literally means making things faster. See the problem with agile? All the jargon and stories that the agile tribesman like to build upon simple things.
  - ses1984 2y ago
    Less waste means less waste. You can carve a guitar neck out of a single large piece of wood, but 60% of that piece of wood turns into waste. Or you can glue three much smaller pieces of wood together, and 5% of that wood turns to waste. It takes longer to make less waste.
    - m_rpn 2y ago
      we can spin the semantics how much we want, but if you ask 100 managers what they mean with "agile" is "do things faster".
    - exitb 2y ago
      In software development, time is the wood we carve stuff out of.
    - thfuran 2y ago
      But the waste in software development is time/labor, not wood.
  - afro88 2y ago
psunavy03 2y ago
Agile is not dying a slow, painful death. It's won. Iterative development is the order of the day in software.
- randomdata 2y ago
  Iterative development is Royce's "Waterfall" model. It long predates Agile. Agile is about eliminating management in favour of self-organizing teams. Hence how we ended up with all these tools (standups, Jira, etc.) to try and help developers do the work that managers would normally do. Although, frankly, I'm not sure Agile ever happened. What we got instead were managers trying to force developers to use tools intended for self-organizing teams, but still with managers and without self-organization, and everyone suffering from the impedance mismatch. Now that we're in a new age of higher interest rates, managers are realizing that, if they want to keep their jobs, they'd be best get back to doing the work themselves rather than trying to pass the work off to others. The passing of the buck is what we're seeing the death of.
  - psunavy03 2y ago
    > Agile is about eliminating management in favour of self-organizing teams. Yeah . . . no. The biggest mistake the Agile movement ever made was sidelining management and claiming they were irrelevant. You can't do any kind of work at scale without some layer of management and coordination. OK, sure, there's the pie-in-the-sky dream that every company will be able to swarm on problems and self-organize at every level. But that's not feasible in the majority of cases. The correct answer is to manage correctly by recognizing the professional expertise of people doing the work and giving them latitude to come up with creative solutions as opposed to dictating everything. But companies have CEOs and boards to set the overall direction of the organization, and that's reality as opposed to some anarcho-capitalistic pie in the sky.
    - randomdata 2y ago
      > not feasible in the majority of cases. Was it supposed to be? The Twelve Principles makes it very clear that you need extra special people to have any chance. It was clearly never meant for everyone. It literally says so. Perhaps our biggest mistake was thinking that we are special?
GenerWork 2y ago
I find it strange how there's been so much digital ink spilled over agile and Jira, yet they keep being used everywhere. The author talks about how folks he "routinely interfaces with, including upper management on both the business and tech side, at startups and Fortune 500 companies alike, are done or close-to-done with Agile", but I'll believe that when I see it. The author also notes how one sign of tech bloat is talking to customers repeatedly without becoming an expert on customer behavior. One of the reasons for this is that the people who talk to the customers are often times PMs/POs who aren't subject matter experts, and their "talking" is simply asking users if they want a new feature instead of doing discovery as to what users need. This is a UX issue first and foremost, but alas, companies are laying off UX researchers and UX people in general.
- sroussey 2y ago
  In the 1990s, I was working on eCommerce and was sent to our factory in another state for a week to understand that side of the needs, then a few days at a customers place of business in another state. This was a government contractor. Understanding the whole process was important even in that industry at that time.
  - GenerWork 2y ago
    >Understanding the whole process was important even in that industry at that time. Understanding the whole process of the issue you're trying to solve is important in any industry, but that requires people to be proactive. Unfortunately, these days there's a lot of "well, we know what the customer really wants" because they looked at a NPS score or rely exclusively on survey responses, which are inherently reactive.
    - sroussey 2y ago
      Agree. People now might think a 5 minute call is a deep dive. Haha.
lll-o-lll 2y ago
At some point, I need to learn what Jira is exactly. I only used it once, at an org, for a couple of years. It tracked tasks and bugs and such, and integrated with the source control. It seemed… fine? I had no idea it was specifically linked with “agile”, that org wasn’t doing agile. Is Jira “fine”? Is it really the Agile process that people are hating on?
- tgv 2y ago
  It's not particularly agile. It's just another tool. If you just use it for bug tracking, it's fine. At least, for a small team. But when a manager starts using all the other features (progress tracking, time administration), it may become your enemy.
- mcluck 2y ago
  I actually kind of like the subset of Jira that I use. Put tickets in a project, create related tickets when I'm breaking down larger projects, expose the project as a Kanban board so we can see at a glance if the right things are being worked on. That's it. I've essentially built this for myself a few times over so I doubt this is what people are actually paying for so I must be missing all of the features that people hate
- bena 2y ago
  I think most of these solutions are "fine" for their stated goals, but the problem is that bookkeeping is tedious. And that's what Jira (or insert ticket system of your choice here) exposes, the tediousness of the task of keeping proper book of your work. You want to know what's being done, what needs to be done, who's working on what, where they are, what branches or repos are related to that work, how long will it take, etc. And someone's got to write that down, someone's got to keep that up. There are ways to get things to talk to each other to automate some things, but at the end of the day, you gotta enter the data. It's a lot like the "blockchain" in that regard. The issue has hardly ever been the tools around asset management, the issue is about getting reliable data into the system. Bookkeeping also takes time from actual development. So estimating how long something takes and recording that estimate makes that task take even longer.
- randomdata 2y ago
bgidley 2y ago
Agile peaked with Extreme Programming and paper story cards, since then all that seems to have happened is the adoption of more tools/process that missed the whole point of it. The most productive project I ever worked on followed that method - but it's very hard to scale up. I worked somewhere where we dumped our (very complicated) 'agile' tracking tool and went back to cards, and productivity increased, people actually communicated. We did eventually add in JIRA, to support remote team members but banned 'customization', 'workflows' and all the things that actually get in the way of being an Agile team.
- badgersnake 2y ago
  I'm also a fan of XP, but it really wants everyone to be in the same room. JIRA escalates quickly. You're smart to put things in place to prevent that.
- AnimalMuppet 2y ago
  XP says that cards are tokens/mementos of conversations. That's the problem with Jira - the conversations didn't happen. All you have is electronic versions of the cards, but what made the cards useful is missing.
- jrs235 2y ago
  Trello is enough for remote notecards... IMO.
lubujackson 2y ago
I really don't get the Jira hate. I need a place to read about the problem/project, comment/question it and know what work was completed and what remains to be done, which it all does well enough. It also integrates directly with GitHub. I guess if GH had its own version that would be slightly easier. I think most people dislike Jira for how their orgs use it, with sprints and points and as a management/overseer tool. I feel like 90% of engs hating anything is due to management using something as a shortcut metric to battle royale their team with BS efficiency stats (tickets closed! PRs pushed!)
- dheera 2y ago
  0. It takes too much effort to create and manage tickets. There are too many things to click, too many fields too fill, and half of them should be auto-filled. 1. Manager types think JIRA is a solution to getting shit done when the real problem is bad communication and politics.
  - badgersnake 2y ago
    Mandatory fields should be banned. If it's actually important it'll get filled in anyway.
- senkora 2y ago
  I also don’t get the hate. My theory is that, because it is often self-hosted on-prem, some orgs under-provision the hosting and end up with a really sluggish instance, but at the companies that I’ve worked at it has always been quick. Maybe someone here can confirm or refute that theory?
  - arminiusreturns 2y ago
    Talk to people who have admin'd it instead of just users and you will understand very quickly there are a host of issues. Even with tons of hardware the software is just bloated and slow (tons of reports of "I threw a big system at it and payed for on-prem and it's still slow as cold molasses), the backend/api is atrocious, the tooling isn't foss (who customizes versioning?!), migration is another level of PITA, etc, etc, et al
louwrentius 2y ago
Although Jira is mentioned in the title, it's never really discussed. Also, I don't fancy the term 'Tech Bloat' because it doesn't seem to cover at all what the issue at hand really is. To me, the real problem is that: - People don't like to think about process because it's hard and not fun - People don't take responsibility for a process or don't want to due to risk and little reward - People add tasks steps because a minor thing went wrong once, years ago (and nobody involved is still around) - People NEVER remove tasks because they only see risk no reward - People don't seem to understand that processes should be as minimal as possible - People don't seem to understand that you need to hire people that need minimal process and still understand what needs to be done (like asking questions instead of making assumptions) What you end up with is an organisation that has a ton of complaints and gossip, but nothing changes.
MeetingsBrowser 2y ago
The agile manifesto is pretty short and describes basically the opposite of “Agile” used today. > Individuals and interactions over processes and tools > Working software over comprehensive documentation > Customer collaboration over contract negotiation > Responding to change over following a plan I would read it, but I am running late for my daily standup and haven’t finished updating JIRA yet to document my progress since yesterday’s standup.
- philwelch 2y ago
  Agile processes are agile the same way the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea is a democracy.
  - 0xdeadbeefbabe 2y ago
    And it makes waterfall look nice. Evidently manifesto writing is harder than the author(s) thought it would be.
    - randomdata 2y ago
      "Waterfall" is pretty well conceived, to be fair. It only gets a bad rap because people stop reading after the first paragraph. The following paragraphs, what everyone misses, essentially say "but that is not enough, you also need..."
  - dimal 2y ago
    Holy shit, this is the best way to describe it. I mean, just that we have Scrum “ceremonies” should be an indication that it’s the opposite of what it says it is.
- makeitdouble 2y ago
  One way to look at it: did you ever see a place explicitly following the manifesto successfully ? To me the real message was "think for yourself and do what works best for you", and the organizations that actually do that typically don't need to be given directions and don't follow advice from productivity gurus. Toyota didn't read the Agile Manifesto and come up with their own solution to their own problems. The people that fell in love with Agile where the most further from it, the message was vague enough that they would seek more concrete frameworks, which inevitably would put them out of the "think for yourself" zone.
runamuck 2y ago
I've heard Sr. Architects call Agile "formalized micromanagement."
- adolph 2y ago
  Given self-management was an intent of Agile [0], an apt quote is "We have met the enemy and he is us." [1] 0. https://www.scrum.org/resources/blog/scrum-team-self-managing https://www.scrum.org/resources/blog/scrum-team-self-managin... 1. https://www.thisdayinquotes.com/2022/04/we-have-met-the-enemy-and-he-is-us/ https://www.thisdayinquotes.com/2022/04/we-have-met-the-enem...
apercu 2y ago
I love the idea of agile. And I've tried to apply the principles to hundreds and hundreds of projects. But as a consulting type, I've never understood how you run a project with a fixed (well, ok, continuously growing usually) scope, a fixed budget and a fixed timeline. Which are basically the constraints on every single project. I think I have found though, that if you can get a client that will spend the time to really define the project goals and how they will be measured, you can almost steer the scope in the direction of priority features. Then, you can be somewhat successful with running agile on certain parts of a project (like UX design), while "phase-gating" other components of the project that have real dependencies. You end up, in effect, with a waterfall process with some phases being done using agile methodologies.
- dheera 2y ago
  I hate labelled methodologies like "agile" and "waterfall". Manager types routinely think that they're going to change the world by being "agile". I mean, as a fast learner, I'm already agile, have been for 20 years, it's not like you discovered it yesterday. Lots of people have been agile for thousands of years. In reality things get done if you, the manager, unblock blockers, fund necessary shit without piles of documents, make employees happy to work, and make sure nobody is wasting time doing things they are not good at.
- lnsru 2y ago
  Sounds like your clients know what they are doing. That’s very nice way of working. I was involved as employee in countless dubious agile called projects. It’s good way to hide missing project management covering it with dubious rituals like daily standup. That’s exactly what happens in kindergarten and is called morning circle. I must smile thinking adults doing the same in the office.
  - apercu 2y ago
    Basically that's exactly the problem, a serious lack of leadership in nearly every organization. Very little adult behaviour. Rather than discuss how specific features can and will solve business objectives and how exactly they will be measured, it's all a bunch of hand-waving and arbitrary deadlines.
chakintosh 2y ago
I'm writing this while sitting in a "sprint demo", mobilizing the entire dev team, wasting time and money over 2 hours to demo a bunch of small features with no tangible ROI.
- windows2020 2y ago
  Move it to EOD Friday and make it optional. Tune will change! However, these meetings can be helpful every so many months.
m_rpn 2y ago
"Agile Ceremonies Bible: the decline of the Church of Agile", this will be the tile of my next book.
voytec 2y ago
Somewhat related website: "Real opinions from real people about a project management system which unfortunately is also real" https://ifuckinghatejira.com/ https://ifuckinghatejira.com/
whoChumpedwho 2y ago
defend your existence! hundreds of hours have been pumped into this framework so ... yeah. something has got to give. can bad be replaced with a lesser bad?! why not take the hit, eat the loss, and uturn to good, perhaps ...
marcodiego 2y ago
Jira is dying? Hope it is a slow and painful death! Well.. actually, it doesn't needs to be slow.
dfilppi 2y ago
[dead]
huqedato 2y ago
RIP both. Jira is a loss of time. And Agile is even worse, just a useless, counterproductive dogma that only drags the development of the product. We dropped them both during the pandemics, and that's how it stayed.
jonstewart 2y ago
I miss FogBugz.
alfor 2y ago
Jira and the modern cargo cult agile make me hate software development. The important part is to create a team, people working together, helping each other, trusting each other. Anything that increase trust and organic collaboration is useful, most of the rest is a waste of time. Ex: if your estimates are used once to put the blame on someone, congratulation you just destroyed the morale and trust of the whole team. Now everyone will start to lie and pad their estimates, the game is now how to behave to cover your ass and the one of your friends.
navigate8310 2y ago
https://www.freedium.cfd/https://ehandbook.com/the-slow-painful-death-of-agile-and-jira-c8de04e4269a https://www.freedium.cfd/https://ehandbook.com/the-slow-pain...
talkingtab 2y ago
Unfortunately, words often lose their meaning. For example, Democracy. As in the "Deutsche Demokratische Republik", or East Germany as it was. You can put any name on anything. You can call a tyranny democracy. Does that mean Democracy is bad, or does it just mean some people either don't understand it. Democracy is a system of interaction. Agile is a system of interaction. And one could say that Jira is to Agile as the GDR was to democracy. It is designed to sell, right? And who really cares about Agile? It is a name for a system of interaction in software product development. Just a name. The question is whether there is something better. It is easy to say Jira sucks and Agile sucks. The questions are a) is there a better system of software product development and b) are there good tools that help you implement that system? And perhaps the other question is WHY? Why is democracy supposed to work? Why is Agile supposed to work?
fredgrott 2y ago
Who in their right sane mine would use a product like Jira with its bad UI? Seriously, I do not want to use a UI that gets in the way of my process...which is why I use kanban boards....so much simpler...and I use it in every process from code to design to writing...
agrippanux 2y ago
I was a newly hired Director of Engineering a company that drank the Kool-Aid of Agile and had an independent team of Scrummasters who just facilitated morning stand-ups. They had no project management responsibilities, so I kept asking what do they do all day after the morning stand-up and no one could answer me. I got severe pushback that they should take on any set of greater responsibilities. I founded several new teams at that company and was approached by the head of the Scrummasters to integrate with their process. I flatly said no, I don't need your services, I've been running teams for 20 years and I'm good. It became this huge blowup that went all the way up the chain of execs until a compromise was reached - I had to accept Scrummasters for my teams but I could direct them to do nothing except basic JIRA ticket shuffling. Fast forward a few years, I've left that place, but my teams became the centerpieces of the company and all new teams are now modeled after them. The Scrummaster team was cut in half. The best part is my team structure is closer to the spirit of Agile with self-organizing teams empowered to operate how best suits them and the Scrummaster team was forcing rigid ceremonies that were at best time consuming and at worst completely useless.
- mytailorisrich 2y ago
  I've always interpreted the 'scrum master' role as the person on the team that is both the process expert and senior enough to be able to generally coach others and help unblocking issues. Ie. one of the senior devs on the team that has been interested enough to learn the scrum agile process, but who takes on the role can change depending on circumstances. But obviously this means it's not a dedicated role and so a missed 'opportunity' to create more "manager of something" roles, especially for project managers who feel threatened.
  - AwaAwa 2y ago
    More responsibility for the same pay, corralling people, and inevitably adding their workload to yours? Because SME/mentor < sr dev when it comes time to rightsize the CxOs gambling losses. Not surprising sr devs weren't jumping on this whole hog.
    - 2y ago
Mc91 2y ago
Most shops are doing (theoretically) agile, and specifically scrum. Where I work we are theoretically doing scrum, but it is the worst of all worlds. Tickets (I mean - stories) are very vaguely specified. While we get almost no specs for the stories, we are asked to point the stories, and are then held to those estimates. We have deadlines, even though the point of scrum is not to have deadlines. Also, the features often tend to be complex and incremental, so if I am off doing other work, no one can easily step in and work on the feature I am doing, so that there is the agileness to move me off the feature I'm working on to fix some fire, but not the agileness to have someone else work on the story. "That's not really agile, that's not really scrum" - well, whatever. Most of the SWEs I know are in similar boats. It can depend, I did have a PM a few years ago who actually did spec out the stories more. I can get on my PM's back to spec out the stories of course, but I can also spend all day getting on everyone's back to do their jobs as well. It's none of the benefits of waterfall, with almost all of the downsides. Plus the theoretical benefits of scrum like no deadlines or the ability to move people around like cogs is not something found either.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
iainctduncan 2y ago
It's not agile... it's Scrum and Jira. I have been on multiple teams that switched from Scrum to Kanban and will never go back. I'm convinced the whole process of fitting things into two week sprints is a huge time drain, gets abused too easily, and doesn't justify itself if you have decent CI anyway. Give a Scrum Master and a Product Owner a Jira install and you can do the most amazing tricks with disappearing thousand dollar bills.... :-)
pentagrama 2y ago
Non paywall link https://www.freedium.cfd/https://ehandbook.com/the-slow-painful-death-of-agile-and-jira-c8de04e4269a https://www.freedium.cfd/https://ehandbook.com/the-slow-pain...
CSMastermind 2y ago
I've said before but I'll repeat: Agile™ was born from web development consultancies as a defensive process for managing bad clients. A lot of the process will make sense if you think about it in terms of business stakeholders eventually suing you. You want to make sure every decision is documented, never commit to a firm timeline, produce artifacts of work at a super granular cadence, and make sure to give stakeholders the illusion of control. It's not a good way to make software but it is a consistent way to make software. This makes it attractive to large non-tech businesses because it means that they can effectively reason about and plan software development at a high level. They'll never be super fast in delivering that product but for most of these companies that doesn't matter. Their moat isn't their technology - it's something else and they just need the software to work well enough to facilitate the actual business processes that are their moat.
soerxpso 2y ago
> The World Doesn’t Need More Features Unfortunately, "more features" is a lot easier to market and sell than "simple and actually works", at least on the timescale most companies operate on.
- jrs235 2y ago
  And "simple and actually works" allows for smaller teams and fewer developers...
rcarmo 2y ago
Unpopular take: Agile was effective at the beginning, before it turned into a certification/rubberstamping goldmine and became so complicated that any efficiency gains evaporated when faced with the amount of ceremony. These days you don’t really need specific tooling—nor should you rely on it to rate features and keep track of meaningful work.
- namaria 2y ago
  Agile, like any other system, has become a big ball of mud. Complex systems will always accrete complexity. New elites will bulldoze a nice location and start a new, open and beautifully designed quarter for themselves. And pretty soon it will be swallowed by the mud of complexity.

104 points by thecosas 2y ago

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

Meh, I get people hate Jira, but every time I ask people "What would you rather do instead" there's absolutely no agreement on what's a better solution. I think it's imoprtant to recognize that if a whole crowd of people say "We hate X" but everybody in that crowd hates eachothers proposals even more, it just creates a facade of agreement where there is none.

pavel_lishin 2y ago
"I hate that we eat a bowl of feces every day, can we switch to something else? "I want steak!" "I want salad!" "I want fish!" "Alright, well, there's absolutely no agreement, let's stick with the feces."
- Arubis 2y ago
  Same point I'm trying to make, but you _absolutely_ win on effect. Well put!
- m_rpn 2y ago
  Best comment of 2024, maybe even 2025 just on trust.
  - pavel_lishin 2y ago
    Don't give me that sort of trust, I'm sure I'll find some way to milkshake duck myself.
- zug_zug 2y ago
  I feel like maybe you're intentionally misunderstanding the point I'm making, because your example kind of illustrates my point: In that case you'd probably find nearly 100% agreement on steak over feces, or salad over feces, or fish over feces. You'd have complete agreement on any alternative to feces. But if you read this thread, it's actually full of people actually saying "I was forced to use [alternative tool] and I prefer Jira". There is no tool that has 100% support over Jira. In fact I'd be surprised if there's a single alternantive to Jira that even 40% of people agree is better.
- darepublic 2y ago
  I once worked with a surly backend developer at a company where for whatever reason the relationship between front and backend was quite poor. One day we were sitting in a long boring meeting and this guy told a story about how his children learned to talk with one another in preschool. The point was we had failed to achieve what the toddlers had, and this comment garnered a big round of laughs. Later on I filed a bug ticket with backend that was legit and this same developer acknowledged it as such. Then what happened was he and the other backend devs made the endpoint completely non-functional, removing even the workaround I had been using. The ticket stayed in limbo until they got back to me and basically said they could return it to its original buggy state or "explore" the matter further. Not keen on more passive aggressive shenanigans I said just return it back to original form. All this to say that.. making a fun joke that obscures the actual complexity of the problem is a sure way to score points with thoughtless buffoons, but it doesn't mean you aren't a hypocritical jerk and that you're mostly wrong.
Arubis 2y ago
How about "figure out different solutions that work better for different teams instead of force-fitting everything from three-person startups to enterprise organizations into the same straitjacket of a framework"?
- badgersnake 2y ago
  I think you just described SOC2, which your dumb-as-fuck customers will insist you do anyway because their even-dumber-than-that customers insist on it.
- tourmalinetaco 2y ago
  Do programmers not end up taking any management courses? Because we learned of contingency theory within the first month of the semester when I was in college.
otteromkram 2y ago
They probably hate Jira for the UI/UX or something similar. I've worked at places that tried to do project management via worksheets and it's quite a challenge to keep those up-to-date, much less add dynamic connections to different repos for updates, adding new stories/tasks, etc. Jira is a godsend by comparison.
- baal80spam 2y ago
  I remember MS Project. Those were the days...
- datavirtue 2y ago
  I just left a place that had three different tracking tools that devs had to update, with the Azure boards being customized with all kinds of unrelated 9001 process fuckery that necessitated failing to save any update ever until you dug out the field that was missing. The fields changed on each move across the board. Unsurprisingly, they were planning a project to introduce another tool on top of it all. Pretty much just bike shedding the company into the ground.
cacois 2y ago
But it indicates that something is really wrong, right? And that we should all keep noticing that and keep working on a solution? I think the negative responses are directed at the use of "meh" and the seeming indifference to an actual problem that could really use a solution, even if we don't have a perfect one everybody agrees on yet.
taylodl 2y ago
Isn't that the point though? Should there be an alternative we all agree on? All our situations are different. The whole point of being agile was to not take a one-size-fits-all approach to solution development.
miuramxciii 2y ago
I think Jira is in there just because it is the most used tool. Pick and choose any other tool, if the mindset with the new tool is the same, then we are in the same spot. The point is that all the prescribed rules pushed down the throat of developers. (e.g. You must have a daily stand up. You must have a story that is no bigger than x Points, you must NEVER roll in our out stories into a sprint once it starts.. and the list goes on and on..The rules - no matter how "small" they are, they are still a big barrier to being agile in the truth sense of the word. The above are only my observation and my thouhgts, your mile may vary.
bbatha 2y ago
This is a defeatist attitude. There are plenty of jira alternatives that have fewer problems. There are obvious problems with jira that have gone unaddressed for years. For instance performance is horrendous. I would also remove infinite customization. It’s a sales pitch to executives but doesn’t benefit line managers or people working on tickets. For my money Linear is just about perfect.
tourmalinetaco 2y ago
Every individual, and on a broader perspective every group, has innate preferences to different forms of organization. It‘s called contingency theory. Agile fails because it was a form of adaptive organization, built out of the highly adaptive/performant cultures of software development, that was never able to be scaled like they tried. In major part because it lost the adaptive aspects in the hard-coded systems, and created unproductive busywork because people were too busy putting something on the board, rather than focusing on work.

louwrentius 2y ago

Link that does not require Medium account: https://archive.is/NYtYD https://archive.is/NYtYD

taylodl 2y ago

Agile isn't agile when it becomes a proscribed methodology complete with tooling as it violates the final point of the Agile Manifesto: Responding to change over following a plan The whole point was to be agile enough to work in a manner that's most effective your team and organization - and even that may change on a project-by-project bases if different stakeholders are involved.

brightball 2y ago
Yep. The issue has never been "Agile" the issue has always been a desire for command and control, leading to a bunch of "sounds good" ideas with lots of side effects. There's no scope creep with agile, only responding to feedback.
SideburnsOfDoom 2y ago
There are two methodology that are both called "Agile". They are very different, even opposite to each other. The one you will find in the Agile Manifesto and related writings. e.g. "Individuals and interactions over processes and tools" The other is a top-down, upfront-planned, tool based, process heavy corporate method of task-based micromanagement. Usually in Jira. There would be no point in killing Jira, as the management that wants what it does, would simply find a similar equivalent.
manifoldgeo 2y ago
I don't mean this in a snarky way, more just to inform: proscribed actually means forbidden unlike the word prescribed, which means recommended.
- binary132 2y ago
  I wanted to leave this comment, but now I’m going to have to leave a helpful correction to your comment instead: prescribed is closer to “forced”, or “made the rule”, than to “recommended”. :)
makeitdouble 2y ago
TBF, while the Agile Manifesto really truck a cord, it wasn't saying anything concrete (talk to each other, collaborate, be flexible, react to reality etc.), that of course by design. So any actual working system can be stamped as "not agile" as surely there will be some aspect that is not perfect. My favorite was "Customer collaboration over contract negotiation": a contract is there to protect both parties, so of course it will be central to a project and people will preferably stick to it, even adjust it when it doesn't fit the bill anymore. So in any case where things go wrong for whatever reason, we can inevitably say more collaboration was needed and that Agile principle wasn't respected. That probably comes from the same sentiment as parents telling their kid to not fall from their bike, it's in human nature.

wg0 2y ago

> The World Doesn’t Need More Features Whereas a PM's job is all about that. We have bloated products. Mostly. Feature packed with FOMO. Incoherent. Inconsistent. Incompatible. But features.

baal80spam 2y ago
Exactly. PMs motto seems to be: You will have more features and you _will_ like it!
fmbb 2y ago
Coincidentally it seems the reason Jira is a mess is that it has too many PMs chasing too many features. Maybe this was the point of the linked text but I could not get past the paywall. If it was just a board with cards with text it would probably be quite usable.

major505 2y ago

Jira isnt agile. IS just bloeatware. If you need more than a board, and maybe some notifications, you are doing it wrong.

PTOB 2y ago
I appreciate how you added an extra letter to "bloat". It's like visual onomatopoeia.

mattbrewsbytes 2y ago

Agile is not supposed to make development faster. The core element of being agile (small "a") is to avoid doing work that results in features that are hardly used, not needed, etc. In lean terminology this is called eliminating waste in a process. Smaller iterations of deliverable work prevents a big up front design and putting in features including UI designs, software designs, coding, tests, QA testing, etc. and then it doesn't get used or has minimal ROI. JIRA sucks. If you think your issues with delivery are tied to your work tracking system then you're looking at the wrong things.

m_rpn 2y ago
Less waste literally means making things faster. See the problem with agile? All the jargon and stories that the agile tribesman like to build upon simple things.
- ses1984 2y ago
  Less waste means less waste. You can carve a guitar neck out of a single large piece of wood, but 60% of that piece of wood turns into waste. Or you can glue three much smaller pieces of wood together, and 5% of that wood turns to waste. It takes longer to make less waste.
  - m_rpn 2y ago
    we can spin the semantics how much we want, but if you ask 100 managers what they mean with "agile" is "do things faster".
  - exitb 2y ago
    In software development, time is the wood we carve stuff out of.
  - thfuran 2y ago
    But the waste in software development is time/labor, not wood.
- afro88 2y ago

psunavy03 2y ago

Agile is not dying a slow, painful death. It's won. Iterative development is the order of the day in software.

randomdata 2y ago
Iterative development is Royce's "Waterfall" model. It long predates Agile. Agile is about eliminating management in favour of self-organizing teams. Hence how we ended up with all these tools (standups, Jira, etc.) to try and help developers do the work that managers would normally do. Although, frankly, I'm not sure Agile ever happened. What we got instead were managers trying to force developers to use tools intended for self-organizing teams, but still with managers and without self-organization, and everyone suffering from the impedance mismatch. Now that we're in a new age of higher interest rates, managers are realizing that, if they want to keep their jobs, they'd be best get back to doing the work themselves rather than trying to pass the work off to others. The passing of the buck is what we're seeing the death of.
- psunavy03 2y ago
  > Agile is about eliminating management in favour of self-organizing teams. Yeah . . . no. The biggest mistake the Agile movement ever made was sidelining management and claiming they were irrelevant. You can't do any kind of work at scale without some layer of management and coordination. OK, sure, there's the pie-in-the-sky dream that every company will be able to swarm on problems and self-organize at every level. But that's not feasible in the majority of cases. The correct answer is to manage correctly by recognizing the professional expertise of people doing the work and giving them latitude to come up with creative solutions as opposed to dictating everything. But companies have CEOs and boards to set the overall direction of the organization, and that's reality as opposed to some anarcho-capitalistic pie in the sky.
  - randomdata 2y ago
    > not feasible in the majority of cases. Was it supposed to be? The Twelve Principles makes it very clear that you need extra special people to have any chance. It was clearly never meant for everyone. It literally says so. Perhaps our biggest mistake was thinking that we are special?

GenerWork 2y ago

I find it strange how there's been so much digital ink spilled over agile and Jira, yet they keep being used everywhere. The author talks about how folks he "routinely interfaces with, including upper management on both the business and tech side, at startups and Fortune 500 companies alike, are done or close-to-done with Agile", but I'll believe that when I see it. The author also notes how one sign of tech bloat is talking to customers repeatedly without becoming an expert on customer behavior. One of the reasons for this is that the people who talk to the customers are often times PMs/POs who aren't subject matter experts, and their "talking" is simply asking users if they want a new feature instead of doing discovery as to what users need. This is a UX issue first and foremost, but alas, companies are laying off UX researchers and UX people in general.

sroussey 2y ago
In the 1990s, I was working on eCommerce and was sent to our factory in another state for a week to understand that side of the needs, then a few days at a customers place of business in another state. This was a government contractor. Understanding the whole process was important even in that industry at that time.
- GenerWork 2y ago
  >Understanding the whole process was important even in that industry at that time. Understanding the whole process of the issue you're trying to solve is important in any industry, but that requires people to be proactive. Unfortunately, these days there's a lot of "well, we know what the customer really wants" because they looked at a NPS score or rely exclusively on survey responses, which are inherently reactive.
  - sroussey 2y ago
    Agree. People now might think a 5 minute call is a deep dive. Haha.

lll-o-lll 2y ago

At some point, I need to learn what Jira is exactly. I only used it once, at an org, for a couple of years. It tracked tasks and bugs and such, and integrated with the source control. It seemed… fine? I had no idea it was specifically linked with “agile”, that org wasn’t doing agile. Is Jira “fine”? Is it really the Agile process that people are hating on?

tgv 2y ago
It's not particularly agile. It's just another tool. If you just use it for bug tracking, it's fine. At least, for a small team. But when a manager starts using all the other features (progress tracking, time administration), it may become your enemy.
mcluck 2y ago
I actually kind of like the subset of Jira that I use. Put tickets in a project, create related tickets when I'm breaking down larger projects, expose the project as a Kanban board so we can see at a glance if the right things are being worked on. That's it. I've essentially built this for myself a few times over so I doubt this is what people are actually paying for so I must be missing all of the features that people hate
bena 2y ago
I think most of these solutions are "fine" for their stated goals, but the problem is that bookkeeping is tedious. And that's what Jira (or insert ticket system of your choice here) exposes, the tediousness of the task of keeping proper book of your work. You want to know what's being done, what needs to be done, who's working on what, where they are, what branches or repos are related to that work, how long will it take, etc. And someone's got to write that down, someone's got to keep that up. There are ways to get things to talk to each other to automate some things, but at the end of the day, you gotta enter the data. It's a lot like the "blockchain" in that regard. The issue has hardly ever been the tools around asset management, the issue is about getting reliable data into the system. Bookkeeping also takes time from actual development. So estimating how long something takes and recording that estimate makes that task take even longer.
randomdata 2y ago

bgidley 2y ago

Agile peaked with Extreme Programming and paper story cards, since then all that seems to have happened is the adoption of more tools/process that missed the whole point of it. The most productive project I ever worked on followed that method - but it's very hard to scale up. I worked somewhere where we dumped our (very complicated) 'agile' tracking tool and went back to cards, and productivity increased, people actually communicated. We did eventually add in JIRA, to support remote team members but banned 'customization', 'workflows' and all the things that actually get in the way of being an Agile team.

badgersnake 2y ago
I'm also a fan of XP, but it really wants everyone to be in the same room. JIRA escalates quickly. You're smart to put things in place to prevent that.
AnimalMuppet 2y ago
XP says that cards are tokens/mementos of conversations. That's the problem with Jira - the conversations didn't happen. All you have is electronic versions of the cards, but what made the cards useful is missing.
jrs235 2y ago
Trello is enough for remote notecards... IMO.

lubujackson 2y ago

I really don't get the Jira hate. I need a place to read about the problem/project, comment/question it and know what work was completed and what remains to be done, which it all does well enough. It also integrates directly with GitHub. I guess if GH had its own version that would be slightly easier. I think most people dislike Jira for how their orgs use it, with sprints and points and as a management/overseer tool. I feel like 90% of engs hating anything is due to management using something as a shortcut metric to battle royale their team with BS efficiency stats (tickets closed! PRs pushed!)

dheera 2y ago
0. It takes too much effort to create and manage tickets. There are too many things to click, too many fields too fill, and half of them should be auto-filled. 1. Manager types think JIRA is a solution to getting shit done when the real problem is bad communication and politics.
- badgersnake 2y ago
  Mandatory fields should be banned. If it's actually important it'll get filled in anyway.
senkora 2y ago
I also don’t get the hate. My theory is that, because it is often self-hosted on-prem, some orgs under-provision the hosting and end up with a really sluggish instance, but at the companies that I’ve worked at it has always been quick. Maybe someone here can confirm or refute that theory?
- arminiusreturns 2y ago
  Talk to people who have admin'd it instead of just users and you will understand very quickly there are a host of issues. Even with tons of hardware the software is just bloated and slow (tons of reports of "I threw a big system at it and payed for on-prem and it's still slow as cold molasses), the backend/api is atrocious, the tooling isn't foss (who customizes versioning?!), migration is another level of PITA, etc, etc, et al

louwrentius 2y ago

Although Jira is mentioned in the title, it's never really discussed. Also, I don't fancy the term 'Tech Bloat' because it doesn't seem to cover at all what the issue at hand really is. To me, the real problem is that: - People don't like to think about process because it's hard and not fun - People don't take responsibility for a process or don't want to due to risk and little reward - People add tasks steps because a minor thing went wrong once, years ago (and nobody involved is still around) - People NEVER remove tasks because they only see risk no reward - People don't seem to understand that processes should be as minimal as possible - People don't seem to understand that you need to hire people that need minimal process and still understand what needs to be done (like asking questions instead of making assumptions) What you end up with is an organisation that has a ton of complaints and gossip, but nothing changes.

MeetingsBrowser 2y ago

The agile manifesto is pretty short and describes basically the opposite of “Agile” used today. > Individuals and interactions over processes and tools > Working software over comprehensive documentation > Customer collaboration over contract negotiation > Responding to change over following a plan I would read it, but I am running late for my daily standup and haven’t finished updating JIRA yet to document my progress since yesterday’s standup.

philwelch 2y ago
Agile processes are agile the same way the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea is a democracy.
- 0xdeadbeefbabe 2y ago
  And it makes waterfall look nice. Evidently manifesto writing is harder than the author(s) thought it would be.
  - randomdata 2y ago
    "Waterfall" is pretty well conceived, to be fair. It only gets a bad rap because people stop reading after the first paragraph. The following paragraphs, what everyone misses, essentially say "but that is not enough, you also need..."
- dimal 2y ago
  Holy shit, this is the best way to describe it. I mean, just that we have Scrum “ceremonies” should be an indication that it’s the opposite of what it says it is.
makeitdouble 2y ago
One way to look at it: did you ever see a place explicitly following the manifesto successfully ? To me the real message was "think for yourself and do what works best for you", and the organizations that actually do that typically don't need to be given directions and don't follow advice from productivity gurus. Toyota didn't read the Agile Manifesto and come up with their own solution to their own problems. The people that fell in love with Agile where the most further from it, the message was vague enough that they would seek more concrete frameworks, which inevitably would put them out of the "think for yourself" zone.

runamuck 2y ago

I've heard Sr. Architects call Agile "formalized micromanagement."

adolph 2y ago
Given self-management was an intent of Agile [0], an apt quote is "We have met the enemy and he is us." [1] 0. https://www.scrum.org/resources/blog/scrum-team-self-managing https://www.scrum.org/resources/blog/scrum-team-self-managin... 1. https://www.thisdayinquotes.com/2022/04/we-have-met-the-enemy-and-he-is-us/ https://www.thisdayinquotes.com/2022/04/we-have-met-the-enem...

apercu 2y ago

I love the idea of agile. And I've tried to apply the principles to hundreds and hundreds of projects. But as a consulting type, I've never understood how you run a project with a fixed (well, ok, continuously growing usually) scope, a fixed budget and a fixed timeline. Which are basically the constraints on every single project. I think I have found though, that if you can get a client that will spend the time to really define the project goals and how they will be measured, you can almost steer the scope in the direction of priority features. Then, you can be somewhat successful with running agile on certain parts of a project (like UX design), while "phase-gating" other components of the project that have real dependencies. You end up, in effect, with a waterfall process with some phases being done using agile methodologies.

dheera 2y ago
I hate labelled methodologies like "agile" and "waterfall". Manager types routinely think that they're going to change the world by being "agile". I mean, as a fast learner, I'm already agile, have been for 20 years, it's not like you discovered it yesterday. Lots of people have been agile for thousands of years. In reality things get done if you, the manager, unblock blockers, fund necessary shit without piles of documents, make employees happy to work, and make sure nobody is wasting time doing things they are not good at.
lnsru 2y ago
Sounds like your clients know what they are doing. That’s very nice way of working. I was involved as employee in countless dubious agile called projects. It’s good way to hide missing project management covering it with dubious rituals like daily standup. That’s exactly what happens in kindergarten and is called morning circle. I must smile thinking adults doing the same in the office.
- apercu 2y ago
  Basically that's exactly the problem, a serious lack of leadership in nearly every organization. Very little adult behaviour. Rather than discuss how specific features can and will solve business objectives and how exactly they will be measured, it's all a bunch of hand-waving and arbitrary deadlines.

chakintosh 2y ago

I'm writing this while sitting in a "sprint demo", mobilizing the entire dev team, wasting time and money over 2 hours to demo a bunch of small features with no tangible ROI.

windows2020 2y ago
Move it to EOD Friday and make it optional. Tune will change! However, these meetings can be helpful every so many months.

m_rpn 2y ago

"Agile Ceremonies Bible: the decline of the Church of Agile", this will be the tile of my next book.

voytec 2y ago

Somewhat related website: "Real opinions from real people about a project management system which unfortunately is also real" https://ifuckinghatejira.com/ https://ifuckinghatejira.com/

whoChumpedwho 2y ago

defend your existence! hundreds of hours have been pumped into this framework so ... yeah. something has got to give. can bad be replaced with a lesser bad?! why not take the hit, eat the loss, and uturn to good, perhaps ...

marcodiego 2y ago

Jira is dying? Hope it is a slow and painful death! Well.. actually, it doesn't needs to be slow.

dfilppi 2y ago

[dead]

huqedato 2y ago

RIP both. Jira is a loss of time. And Agile is even worse, just a useless, counterproductive dogma that only drags the development of the product. We dropped them both during the pandemics, and that's how it stayed.

jonstewart 2y ago

I miss FogBugz.

alfor 2y ago

Jira and the modern cargo cult agile make me hate software development. The important part is to create a team, people working together, helping each other, trusting each other. Anything that increase trust and organic collaboration is useful, most of the rest is a waste of time. Ex: if your estimates are used once to put the blame on someone, congratulation you just destroyed the morale and trust of the whole team. Now everyone will start to lie and pad their estimates, the game is now how to behave to cover your ass and the one of your friends.

navigate8310 2y ago

https://www.freedium.cfd/https://ehandbook.com/the-slow-painful-death-of-agile-and-jira-c8de04e4269a https://www.freedium.cfd/https://ehandbook.com/the-slow-pain...

talkingtab 2y ago

Unfortunately, words often lose their meaning. For example, Democracy. As in the "Deutsche Demokratische Republik", or East Germany as it was. You can put any name on anything. You can call a tyranny democracy. Does that mean Democracy is bad, or does it just mean some people either don't understand it. Democracy is a system of interaction. Agile is a system of interaction. And one could say that Jira is to Agile as the GDR was to democracy. It is designed to sell, right? And who really cares about Agile? It is a name for a system of interaction in software product development. Just a name. The question is whether there is something better. It is easy to say Jira sucks and Agile sucks. The questions are a) is there a better system of software product development and b) are there good tools that help you implement that system? And perhaps the other question is WHY? Why is democracy supposed to work? Why is Agile supposed to work?

fredgrott 2y ago

Who in their right sane mine would use a product like Jira with its bad UI? Seriously, I do not want to use a UI that gets in the way of my process...which is why I use kanban boards....so much simpler...and I use it in every process from code to design to writing...

agrippanux 2y ago

I was a newly hired Director of Engineering a company that drank the Kool-Aid of Agile and had an independent team of Scrummasters who just facilitated morning stand-ups. They had no project management responsibilities, so I kept asking what do they do all day after the morning stand-up and no one could answer me. I got severe pushback that they should take on any set of greater responsibilities. I founded several new teams at that company and was approached by the head of the Scrummasters to integrate with their process. I flatly said no, I don't need your services, I've been running teams for 20 years and I'm good. It became this huge blowup that went all the way up the chain of execs until a compromise was reached - I had to accept Scrummasters for my teams but I could direct them to do nothing except basic JIRA ticket shuffling. Fast forward a few years, I've left that place, but my teams became the centerpieces of the company and all new teams are now modeled after them. The Scrummaster team was cut in half. The best part is my team structure is closer to the spirit of Agile with self-organizing teams empowered to operate how best suits them and the Scrummaster team was forcing rigid ceremonies that were at best time consuming and at worst completely useless.

mytailorisrich 2y ago
I've always interpreted the 'scrum master' role as the person on the team that is both the process expert and senior enough to be able to generally coach others and help unblocking issues. Ie. one of the senior devs on the team that has been interested enough to learn the scrum agile process, but who takes on the role can change depending on circumstances. But obviously this means it's not a dedicated role and so a missed 'opportunity' to create more "manager of something" roles, especially for project managers who feel threatened.
- AwaAwa 2y ago
  More responsibility for the same pay, corralling people, and inevitably adding their workload to yours? Because SME/mentor < sr dev when it comes time to rightsize the CxOs gambling losses. Not surprising sr devs weren't jumping on this whole hog.
  - 2y ago

Mc91 2y ago

Most shops are doing (theoretically) agile, and specifically scrum. Where I work we are theoretically doing scrum, but it is the worst of all worlds. Tickets (I mean - stories) are very vaguely specified. While we get almost no specs for the stories, we are asked to point the stories, and are then held to those estimates. We have deadlines, even though the point of scrum is not to have deadlines. Also, the features often tend to be complex and incremental, so if I am off doing other work, no one can easily step in and work on the feature I am doing, so that there is the agileness to move me off the feature I'm working on to fix some fire, but not the agileness to have someone else work on the story. "That's not really agile, that's not really scrum" - well, whatever. Most of the SWEs I know are in similar boats. It can depend, I did have a PM a few years ago who actually did spec out the stories more. I can get on my PM's back to spec out the stories of course, but I can also spend all day getting on everyone's back to do their jobs as well. It's none of the benefits of waterfall, with almost all of the downsides. Plus the theoretical benefits of scrum like no deadlines or the ability to move people around like cogs is not something found either.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

iainctduncan 2y ago

It's not agile... it's Scrum and Jira. I have been on multiple teams that switched from Scrum to Kanban and will never go back. I'm convinced the whole process of fitting things into two week sprints is a huge time drain, gets abused too easily, and doesn't justify itself if you have decent CI anyway. Give a Scrum Master and a Product Owner a Jira install and you can do the most amazing tricks with disappearing thousand dollar bills.... :-)

pentagrama 2y ago

Non paywall link https://www.freedium.cfd/https://ehandbook.com/the-slow-painful-death-of-agile-and-jira-c8de04e4269a https://www.freedium.cfd/https://ehandbook.com/the-slow-pain...

CSMastermind 2y ago

I've said before but I'll repeat: Agile™ was born from web development consultancies as a defensive process for managing bad clients. A lot of the process will make sense if you think about it in terms of business stakeholders eventually suing you. You want to make sure every decision is documented, never commit to a firm timeline, produce artifacts of work at a super granular cadence, and make sure to give stakeholders the illusion of control. It's not a good way to make software but it is a consistent way to make software. This makes it attractive to large non-tech businesses because it means that they can effectively reason about and plan software development at a high level. They'll never be super fast in delivering that product but for most of these companies that doesn't matter. Their moat isn't their technology - it's something else and they just need the software to work well enough to facilitate the actual business processes that are their moat.

soerxpso 2y ago

> The World Doesn’t Need More Features Unfortunately, "more features" is a lot easier to market and sell than "simple and actually works", at least on the timescale most companies operate on.

jrs235 2y ago
And "simple and actually works" allows for smaller teams and fewer developers...

rcarmo 2y ago

Unpopular take: Agile was effective at the beginning, before it turned into a certification/rubberstamping goldmine and became so complicated that any efficiency gains evaporated when faced with the amount of ceremony. These days you don’t really need specific tooling—nor should you rely on it to rate features and keep track of meaningful work.

namaria 2y ago
Agile, like any other system, has become a big ball of mud. Complex systems will always accrete complexity. New elites will bulldoze a nice location and start a new, open and beautifully designed quarter for themselves. And pretty soon it will be swallowed by the mud of complexity.