6 ms·

Agile Is Dead

70 points by witweb 2y ago

hnlurker22 2y ago
I had a manager that secretly but obviously asked chatgpt how long a task should take and how to do it, then assign it to engineers. Can you imagine the state of their code?
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
FrankWilhoit 2y ago
From the enterprise perspective, the purpose of Agile was to fail while giving the appearance of the greatest and most conscientious possible effort. "If it can't be done this way, it can't be done at all": time to gift more tens of millions of dollars to IBM and Oracle and Microsoft.
- John_Cena 2y ago
  Not all that counts can be counted. Not all that can be counted counts. I hate Agile and I'm not going to try and sugar coat that. "We're drowning under the weight of clueless product leads, managers, and owners who've never written a line of code" That's why this still exists though not performant, because it some peoples entire entire careers now.
  - deprecative 2y ago
    We don't care about productivity. We care about controlling labor. The more control you have over your labor the more you feel like you're doing things. Zero trust. Zero verification. That's just how it works.
- uxhacker 2y ago
  Agile is dead long live (fr)agile.
bradley13 2y ago
[flagged]
indulona 2y ago
it was never alive to begin with. certainly not in the real world.
cagenut 2y ago
the purpose of agile was to align the most requested feature work to the most expensive pay cycles. the purpose of devops was to get two for the price of one. everything else has been content marketing or people parroting whatever they thought would get them a raise.
karaterobot 2y ago
When I hear about Agile these days, it's almost always an excuse not to do the right thing. The last time it came up was someone resisting defining our company's product delivery process, which has always suffered from a lack of clarity. The time before that, it was someone saying "Let's be Agile about this", but meaning "let's do a shitty version of this, and pretend we'll come back to it later, rather than just moving on to the shitty version of the next feature." The response that "you're not practicing Real Agile" may be true, but is unhelpful, as this is the norm rather than the exception. A consistent failure of any plan to succeed in its purpose after 25 years is a failure of that plan, not of the world, at least when the plan promises improvement on a shorter-than-generational timeline. The only time I've ever seen Agile work is when the technical lead who practiced it was incredibly charismatic and forceful, and the team wanted to do what he said. Like magic. It worked great, and then the guy left, and the whole thing fell apart within months. But, I don't think what worked about that team was Agile per se, I think it was a unique individual leader that made it work, and it would have been just as successful without Agile. I'm skeptical about methodologies. The force of the team and the company they're embedded in is so strong, it will overcome a generic system in most cases. I think you probably have to make an ad hoc solution that continually evolves, and have someone with rare abilities prune it and champion it. That is so harder. In all likelihood, muddling along is probably the realistic solution for most companies.
- graypegg 2y ago
  To a lot of folk, that's a feature! Capital A "Agile" is just sort of a pointer to "ayyy you've heard of other companies doing this" in a lot of people's minds. I think we'd end up doing this no matter what. If it wasn't "agile" it would be "brisk methodology" or "go-minded development" or something. The reality is people sort of just like having hand-wavy terms that they definitely know other people have heard before, but have been given an ever shifting definition for. To that point, I've started hearing people say "kanban" or "iterative planning", explicitly as opposition to agile. Yet, there are no actual changes to the process. All the people are still here, doing the same jobs with newly renamed meetings of the same length. But we are "fighting the agile lie" because we don't say agile! IMO, teams figure out what works for them. Totally agree that methodologies are worth being skeptical about. If you hire sharp smart folks, they figure out a stable way of working. Muddling along isn't that bad if you have smart people muddling!
graypegg 2y ago
> It's for those who believe that skilled engineers are the true drivers of innovation and creators of meaningful products. Maybe the only thing I feel iffy about here. Just feels a bit naïve, I've worked together with some really talented designers. Also worked with some really talented product owners. Can't say I've agreed with every marketer/PR person I've worked with but they've saved our ass a few times. While I do think developers have a major role to play, I don't think a company past a certain size would benefit from only devs making all decisions. A little specialization is OK when there is actually a useful task at hand. There's innovation to be made on design or business side stuff as well. Maybe sort of lame to you, but it's helped me make stuff in the past. Nothing to do with Agile btw, hopefully this doesn't sound like I'm pitching the tech world's private definition of capital A "Agile" with a different lens. Just a plea to appreciate that engineers aren't multitasking super gods.
- diob 2y ago
  Absolutely, I love working with great designers / markets / etc.
- zelphirkalt 2y ago
  I think we need to reverse the roles or how they play out in companies in day to day life. We need other people than engineers to _ask_ for certain changes or _make suggestions_. Not a product manager, who takes ideas from other departments as law and _makes demands_ out of that for the engineers, and then by the might of their management position push the changes through. We could be better off with for example a designer talking directly to the engineers and asking them "Can you achieve XYZ?" then the engineers thinks for a bit and then reply "We can do XY, but Z would be way more effort and not worth it at this time.". Then they decide, whether to do XY even without Z. I don't see why designers or engineers should not be capable of sitting together to come to a decision, and I don't see, how there necessarily someone needs to be involved trying to force something down the throat of engineers. Similar for sales or marketing. They can come to the engineers, asking them: "We would like to sell feature XYZ. Are we ready for that?" then the engineers might say: "Nope, ask again next year.", instead of sales and marketing running off selling things that don't even exist yet. Then there needs to be acceptance and trust in the engineering team's competence. If that trust does not exist, we need to ask ourselves what the company is doing with such a team. How I have come to loath the view, that engineers are like a band of little children, who will run off and go all crazy, if there is no manager ordering them around. Some kind of overarching goals will need to be known or thought of. Those we can extract from having contact with the actual users, and from having great ideas, that we test out and get user feedback for. In reality most engineers never have contact with the actual user in their daily job and as such, it is of course very far removed from being agile.
louwrentius 2y ago
I’ve never been a fan of Agile, but I find this rant superficial and crude. My first thought was: I would never want to work with someone who writes a rant like this. Because to me it shows a lack of empathy and self-awareness, I miss any sense or the slightest hint of humility. Maybe the same can be said of this remark, that’s for you to decide.
- cirrus3 2y ago
  Same. I agree with most of what is said, but this is terrible way to deliver it.
alganet 2y ago
The old manifesto is fine, isn't it? --- 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 still like it. The problem is not the lack of a good manifesto, is that people don't get it. Anyway, I like that someone else apart from me is thinking about these things! I don't know, maybe we do need a new manifesto to shake things up.
- graypegg 2y ago
  > The problem is not the lack of a good manifesto, is that people don't get it. I think that is the problem though. It's still a system for human beings, if the majority of human beings aren't getting it, not sure it works. I can etch my commandments on stone tablets and show some people, but unless they both understand what I'm trying to say AND actually believe it, I don't think my stone tablets are really doing anything.
  - bumby 2y ago
    This is somewhat ironic, considering the first point. If the process is not intelligible to most humans, maybe we should focus on refining/clarifying the process a bit?
- ryandvm 2y ago
  Agile is like communism - it sounds like a great idea. Except it never seems to work anywhere, and everywhere that it turns into a train wreck consisting of 45 minute daily stand-ups and 3 hour meetings arguing about T-shirt sizes or whether points are equivalent to time or not, the only explanation anyone ever proffers is, "well, you weren't doing Agile right". No fucking shit. Nobody can do Agile right. I would argue that if something is so hard to get right, then it is effectively worthless.
  - psunavy03 2y ago
    Bullshit. That's like claiming no one can play good football because the Cleveland Browns suck. https://ronjeffries.com/xprog/articles/jatbaseball/ https://ronjeffries.com/xprog/articles/jatbaseball/
mikeocool 2y ago
I don't really see a real proposal on this site for something better, besides basically "just let the engineers do it" -- which sort of ignores the fact that lots of software is boring business line software where engineers are not SMEs on the usage, and lots of engineers don't want to spend their time becoming SMEs on the business rules of an ERP or a CRM.
Y444 2y ago
“We're drowning under the weight of clueless product leads, managers, and owners who've never written a line of code, yet they somehow dictate how software should be built.” We’ve been through that, you leave coders alone without management and the create a new game engine with custom scripting language and state-of-the-art rendering pipeline and no games to go with it and then they get sad (I’m only half joking to illustrate the point that extreme points of view are often silly)
d--b 2y ago
> The "agile" development we're stuck with today is a joke Are we really? The whole industry has moved on a good 10 years ago. If you feel stuck with agile, you should probably change job.
- arunix 2y ago
  Moved on to ... what?
psunavy03 2y ago
Dumb shits misapplying Agile because "we do standups" are dead. The entire point is and always has been to get the right people working on the right stuff in such a way that they can validate their assumptions and get customer feedback as soon as possible. Not how well you "do Scrum," "increase your velocity," or any of that trash. But actually applying these concepts breaks some managers' brains, and then we get the toxic crap people rant about. The fundamental assumptions behind Agile are as valid as they were 25 years ago. The problem(s) are control freak managers who are incapable of coaching their teams into taking charge at the local level, devs "who just want to code" and not think for themselves about the larger context of the work, and bullshit "life coaches" using Agile coaching as a way to "break into tech" with no tech skills. This is fundamentally a crisis of incompetence, where people are failing to implement what at its roots is a better way of working, in certain contexts anyway, because they fear giving power and control to the rank and file.
- myhf 2y ago
  So true. 90% of Agile practitioners give the rest a bad reputation.
  - AtlasBarfed 2y ago
    Um.... Isn't there some rule of thumb where some substantial threshold of popular regard defined it? I mean I get if there is first principles derivation of a concept, but agilation is not that. Agile is really a communal/socialist mechanism that is ruined the second management more than one later up injects themselves. ... Which is 100% of the time
    - zelphirkalt 2y ago
      Not really in this case, because the manifesto was put out there from the beginning. People's incompetence to actually look at a website and read 4 phrases and doing fake agile is one thing. Agile is another.
- jajko 2y ago
  Well, yes, but - it clearly doesn't work well to only come up with a good idea like that. After initial momentum, people often took it elsewhere, or abandoned. Which tells you a lot about people out there. Maybe one can't force a shiny cool shoe on a feet incapable of using it well, even if it would be great in many aspects. Maybe we need something that is easier adaptable by real people making up real teams and organizations out there, not just cool books and trainings.
lincolnq 2y ago
Poe's Law is hitting me in the face right now. This is satire, right? I can't quite tell (seriously! please tell me) If it is satire, it's quite subtle and well done. It references the old reasons why "Agile" was invented (current software development processes being bureaucratic and meeting-intensive, the new one will be lightweight and engineer-led). If it is not satire, the juxtaposition is striking.
- Noujin 2y ago
  No satire
dogleash 2y ago
I wish you the best of luck in fighting one buzzword with your new one. If it gains traction I'm sure it won't be used by the champions of your buzzword to sneak in their own desires instead of rigid adhereance to your definition. I recently stumbled across a blog post from 2006 explaining all the problems commonly heard today about capital-A agile. That means we've spent at least 18 years faffing about letting conmen steamroll us that it can't be a con because there's a nugget of a good idea burred somewhere in there. Good ideas don't need branding. Branding is never a good idea.
- drewcoo 2y ago
  The con men [edit: pluralize] aren't selling their product to software engineers. They're selling to management. So they twisted agile into some kind of feel-good micromanagement called Agile (with the cap A), which is what appeals to management. How would anyone ever expect a framework that diffuses control from managers to sell well . . . to managers?
JKCalhoun 2y ago
I happen to believe you get "quality software" by giving devs "ownership" of a piece of the software. And by ownership I mean they come back to it on every revision of the software. They add the new features, they fix its bugs ... they can burn it to the ground if they like for reasons of technical debt (or because they feel like it). "But what if that engineer leaves and no one else understands the code?" I hear you ask. So what. We're smart. Put someone smart on it and they'll have it figured out soon enough. Chesterton’s Fence be damned, if the new dev wants to burn it down, let them. You have to accept some risk in this field. But also you have to allow other's the responsibility. And in my experience, they'll rise to the occasion. The groups I was in that claimed to be Agile rotated devs around the project like, um, cogs.
- ebiester 2y ago
  I mean, that works if you give them ownership of the budget and revenue targets. That means if the product does not meet the revenue targets, the development team decreases and the development team has to decide which of their developers are losing their jobs. That way, when the dev wants to burn it down, they are playing with their own consequences. Autonomy comes with consequences.
  - JKCalhoun 2y ago
    > Autonomy comes with consequences. Agree. And being allowed to embrace the consequences is, IMHO, how you get people to rise to their best.
gklitz 2y ago
Ironically “Holistic Development” reads like it’s just the agile manifesto rephrased to remove any mention of the customer.
rogerthis 2y ago
The idea seems to be to replace a set of empty keywords with another.
jonathaneunice 2y ago
"Agile is dead. Long live agile!" (But really, small-a agile has been ascendant, better, and preferred in many places for at least a decade. That or related takes on agility like Shape Up.)
Terretta 2y ago
What actually works are the development models proposed by Royce, the spiral model, DSDM, XP, and something like kanban (pull based) with the manifesto -- all based on the same core essentials: build to the outcome, prioritize learning, build through the unknowns, and deliver what you learned, all in a long term risk and long term RoE weighted way.* Scaled Agile for Enterprise (SAFE), SCRUM, etc., generally don't accomplish this. Any methods that take waterfall and relabel it and add roles until executives are bamboozled into thinking it's Agile™, don't. This is where waterfall probably came from: - Royce, 1970: https://www.praxisframework.org/files/royce1970.pdf https://www.praxisframework.org/files/royce1970.pdf While it's where "waterfall" came from, seems to be because someone stopped reading when they saw Figure 2. Figure 2 is what not to do, he says it doesn't work. By contrast, he already understands principles such as prototype what works then document it, then build it again (Fig 7 Step 3 says make one to throw away) or ski with your customer (Fig. 9 Step 5 says keep tight with the customer), etc. Myth has it the DOD got excited about Figure 2 and ran with it. Most damagingly misunderstood software development paper ever? - Spiral model: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spiral_model https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spiral_model Prototypes with iterative scope and rigor until it's good enough. Sound familiar? - DSDM: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_systems_development_method https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_systems_development_me... Look at the 8 principles and especially the core techniques... - XP: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extreme_programming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extreme_programming "Pairing" is why LLM code copilots "work". * Easy to say.
shalmanese 2y ago
We should just accept the euphemism treadmill is an iron law of the universe and every 10 years, we come up with a new term for insiders as the old term gets degraded. The problem now is people use "agile" to mean anything from the 2001 agile manifesto meaning of the term to the 2024 F500 meaning and that's too long a span of time so the word has lost all communicative value. You can either engage in a fool's errand trying to drag the word back to the original meaning or accepting reality and letting people have it and come up with some new term like "katana development" or some bullshit that means essentially the same thing. The "Observability" crew are good at this, I feel like every 10 years, there's a new coat of paint on essentially the same basic SRE concepts. Like how we went from Oriental to Asian American to AAPI, the mental burden of keeping up with these language changes serves as a basic shibboleth to who is paying attention enough to developments in the field.
Noujin 2y ago
OP I feel like you should quit your job now and find a better place.
elviejo 2y ago
Bertrand Meyer wrote a very good book called Agile: the good, the bad and the ugly. Which really, gives a good balanced view of the practices and the hype. Reading, is what removed the veil in my eyes.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
jmloop 2y ago
Of course, Agile manifesto is bad so I create a new one. Now let's see if we can start making conferences, writing books and release new versions every year. Some teams don´t need Agile. In many products it doesn't make even sense to use it. I think we like to gather and discuss how to fix the world, but we know shit. The people that want to get the things done just need the resources (time, tools, money, etc). Facilitators, that should be the role of PMs.

70 points by witweb 2y ago

I had a manager that secretly but obviously asked chatgpt how long a task should take and how to do it, then assign it to engineers. Can you imagine the state of their code?

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

FrankWilhoit 2y ago

From the enterprise perspective, the purpose of Agile was to fail while giving the appearance of the greatest and most conscientious possible effort. "If it can't be done this way, it can't be done at all": time to gift more tens of millions of dollars to IBM and Oracle and Microsoft.

John_Cena 2y ago
Not all that counts can be counted. Not all that can be counted counts. I hate Agile and I'm not going to try and sugar coat that. "We're drowning under the weight of clueless product leads, managers, and owners who've never written a line of code" That's why this still exists though not performant, because it some peoples entire entire careers now.
- deprecative 2y ago
  We don't care about productivity. We care about controlling labor. The more control you have over your labor the more you feel like you're doing things. Zero trust. Zero verification. That's just how it works.
uxhacker 2y ago
Agile is dead long live (fr)agile.

bradley13 2y ago

[flagged]

indulona 2y ago

it was never alive to begin with. certainly not in the real world.

cagenut 2y ago

the purpose of agile was to align the most requested feature work to the most expensive pay cycles. the purpose of devops was to get two for the price of one. everything else has been content marketing or people parroting whatever they thought would get them a raise.

karaterobot 2y ago

When I hear about Agile these days, it's almost always an excuse not to do the right thing. The last time it came up was someone resisting defining our company's product delivery process, which has always suffered from a lack of clarity. The time before that, it was someone saying "Let's be Agile about this", but meaning "let's do a shitty version of this, and pretend we'll come back to it later, rather than just moving on to the shitty version of the next feature." The response that "you're not practicing Real Agile" may be true, but is unhelpful, as this is the norm rather than the exception. A consistent failure of any plan to succeed in its purpose after 25 years is a failure of that plan, not of the world, at least when the plan promises improvement on a shorter-than-generational timeline. The only time I've ever seen Agile work is when the technical lead who practiced it was incredibly charismatic and forceful, and the team wanted to do what he said. Like magic. It worked great, and then the guy left, and the whole thing fell apart within months. But, I don't think what worked about that team was Agile per se, I think it was a unique individual leader that made it work, and it would have been just as successful without Agile. I'm skeptical about methodologies. The force of the team and the company they're embedded in is so strong, it will overcome a generic system in most cases. I think you probably have to make an ad hoc solution that continually evolves, and have someone with rare abilities prune it and champion it. That is so harder. In all likelihood, muddling along is probably the realistic solution for most companies.

graypegg 2y ago
To a lot of folk, that's a feature! Capital A "Agile" is just sort of a pointer to "ayyy you've heard of other companies doing this" in a lot of people's minds. I think we'd end up doing this no matter what. If it wasn't "agile" it would be "brisk methodology" or "go-minded development" or something. The reality is people sort of just like having hand-wavy terms that they definitely know other people have heard before, but have been given an ever shifting definition for. To that point, I've started hearing people say "kanban" or "iterative planning", explicitly as opposition to agile. Yet, there are no actual changes to the process. All the people are still here, doing the same jobs with newly renamed meetings of the same length. But we are "fighting the agile lie" because we don't say agile! IMO, teams figure out what works for them. Totally agree that methodologies are worth being skeptical about. If you hire sharp smart folks, they figure out a stable way of working. Muddling along isn't that bad if you have smart people muddling!

graypegg 2y ago

> It's for those who believe that skilled engineers are the true drivers of innovation and creators of meaningful products. Maybe the only thing I feel iffy about here. Just feels a bit naïve, I've worked together with some really talented designers. Also worked with some really talented product owners. Can't say I've agreed with every marketer/PR person I've worked with but they've saved our ass a few times. While I do think developers have a major role to play, I don't think a company past a certain size would benefit from only devs making all decisions. A little specialization is OK when there is actually a useful task at hand. There's innovation to be made on design or business side stuff as well. Maybe sort of lame to you, but it's helped me make stuff in the past. Nothing to do with Agile btw, hopefully this doesn't sound like I'm pitching the tech world's private definition of capital A "Agile" with a different lens. Just a plea to appreciate that engineers aren't multitasking super gods.

diob 2y ago
Absolutely, I love working with great designers / markets / etc.
zelphirkalt 2y ago
I think we need to reverse the roles or how they play out in companies in day to day life. We need other people than engineers to _ask_ for certain changes or _make suggestions_. Not a product manager, who takes ideas from other departments as law and _makes demands_ out of that for the engineers, and then by the might of their management position push the changes through. We could be better off with for example a designer talking directly to the engineers and asking them "Can you achieve XYZ?" then the engineers thinks for a bit and then reply "We can do XY, but Z would be way more effort and not worth it at this time.". Then they decide, whether to do XY even without Z. I don't see why designers or engineers should not be capable of sitting together to come to a decision, and I don't see, how there necessarily someone needs to be involved trying to force something down the throat of engineers. Similar for sales or marketing. They can come to the engineers, asking them: "We would like to sell feature XYZ. Are we ready for that?" then the engineers might say: "Nope, ask again next year.", instead of sales and marketing running off selling things that don't even exist yet. Then there needs to be acceptance and trust in the engineering team's competence. If that trust does not exist, we need to ask ourselves what the company is doing with such a team. How I have come to loath the view, that engineers are like a band of little children, who will run off and go all crazy, if there is no manager ordering them around. Some kind of overarching goals will need to be known or thought of. Those we can extract from having contact with the actual users, and from having great ideas, that we test out and get user feedback for. In reality most engineers never have contact with the actual user in their daily job and as such, it is of course very far removed from being agile.

louwrentius 2y ago

I’ve never been a fan of Agile, but I find this rant superficial and crude. My first thought was: I would never want to work with someone who writes a rant like this. Because to me it shows a lack of empathy and self-awareness, I miss any sense or the slightest hint of humility. Maybe the same can be said of this remark, that’s for you to decide.

cirrus3 2y ago
Same. I agree with most of what is said, but this is terrible way to deliver it.

alganet 2y ago

The old manifesto is fine, isn't it? --- 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 still like it. The problem is not the lack of a good manifesto, is that people don't get it. Anyway, I like that someone else apart from me is thinking about these things! I don't know, maybe we do need a new manifesto to shake things up.

graypegg 2y ago
> The problem is not the lack of a good manifesto, is that people don't get it. I think that is the problem though. It's still a system for human beings, if the majority of human beings aren't getting it, not sure it works. I can etch my commandments on stone tablets and show some people, but unless they both understand what I'm trying to say AND actually believe it, I don't think my stone tablets are really doing anything.
- bumby 2y ago
  This is somewhat ironic, considering the first point. If the process is not intelligible to most humans, maybe we should focus on refining/clarifying the process a bit?
ryandvm 2y ago
Agile is like communism - it sounds like a great idea. Except it never seems to work anywhere, and everywhere that it turns into a train wreck consisting of 45 minute daily stand-ups and 3 hour meetings arguing about T-shirt sizes or whether points are equivalent to time or not, the only explanation anyone ever proffers is, "well, you weren't doing Agile right". No fucking shit. Nobody can do Agile right. I would argue that if something is so hard to get right, then it is effectively worthless.
- psunavy03 2y ago
  Bullshit. That's like claiming no one can play good football because the Cleveland Browns suck. https://ronjeffries.com/xprog/articles/jatbaseball/ https://ronjeffries.com/xprog/articles/jatbaseball/

mikeocool 2y ago

I don't really see a real proposal on this site for something better, besides basically "just let the engineers do it" -- which sort of ignores the fact that lots of software is boring business line software where engineers are not SMEs on the usage, and lots of engineers don't want to spend their time becoming SMEs on the business rules of an ERP or a CRM.

Y444 2y ago

“We're drowning under the weight of clueless product leads, managers, and owners who've never written a line of code, yet they somehow dictate how software should be built.” We’ve been through that, you leave coders alone without management and the create a new game engine with custom scripting language and state-of-the-art rendering pipeline and no games to go with it and then they get sad (I’m only half joking to illustrate the point that extreme points of view are often silly)

d--b 2y ago

> The "agile" development we're stuck with today is a joke Are we really? The whole industry has moved on a good 10 years ago. If you feel stuck with agile, you should probably change job.

arunix 2y ago
Moved on to ... what?

psunavy03 2y ago

Dumb shits misapplying Agile because "we do standups" are dead. The entire point is and always has been to get the right people working on the right stuff in such a way that they can validate their assumptions and get customer feedback as soon as possible. Not how well you "do Scrum," "increase your velocity," or any of that trash. But actually applying these concepts breaks some managers' brains, and then we get the toxic crap people rant about. The fundamental assumptions behind Agile are as valid as they were 25 years ago. The problem(s) are control freak managers who are incapable of coaching their teams into taking charge at the local level, devs "who just want to code" and not think for themselves about the larger context of the work, and bullshit "life coaches" using Agile coaching as a way to "break into tech" with no tech skills. This is fundamentally a crisis of incompetence, where people are failing to implement what at its roots is a better way of working, in certain contexts anyway, because they fear giving power and control to the rank and file.

myhf 2y ago
So true. 90% of Agile practitioners give the rest a bad reputation.
- AtlasBarfed 2y ago
  Um.... Isn't there some rule of thumb where some substantial threshold of popular regard defined it? I mean I get if there is first principles derivation of a concept, but agilation is not that. Agile is really a communal/socialist mechanism that is ruined the second management more than one later up injects themselves. ... Which is 100% of the time
  - zelphirkalt 2y ago
    Not really in this case, because the manifesto was put out there from the beginning. People's incompetence to actually look at a website and read 4 phrases and doing fake agile is one thing. Agile is another.
jajko 2y ago
Well, yes, but - it clearly doesn't work well to only come up with a good idea like that. After initial momentum, people often took it elsewhere, or abandoned. Which tells you a lot about people out there. Maybe one can't force a shiny cool shoe on a feet incapable of using it well, even if it would be great in many aspects. Maybe we need something that is easier adaptable by real people making up real teams and organizations out there, not just cool books and trainings.

lincolnq 2y ago

Poe's Law is hitting me in the face right now. This is satire, right? I can't quite tell (seriously! please tell me) If it is satire, it's quite subtle and well done. It references the old reasons why "Agile" was invented (current software development processes being bureaucratic and meeting-intensive, the new one will be lightweight and engineer-led). If it is not satire, the juxtaposition is striking.

Noujin 2y ago
No satire

dogleash 2y ago

I wish you the best of luck in fighting one buzzword with your new one. If it gains traction I'm sure it won't be used by the champions of your buzzword to sneak in their own desires instead of rigid adhereance to your definition. I recently stumbled across a blog post from 2006 explaining all the problems commonly heard today about capital-A agile. That means we've spent at least 18 years faffing about letting conmen steamroll us that it can't be a con because there's a nugget of a good idea burred somewhere in there. Good ideas don't need branding. Branding is never a good idea.

drewcoo 2y ago
The con men [edit: pluralize] aren't selling their product to software engineers. They're selling to management. So they twisted agile into some kind of feel-good micromanagement called Agile (with the cap A), which is what appeals to management. How would anyone ever expect a framework that diffuses control from managers to sell well . . . to managers?

JKCalhoun 2y ago

I happen to believe you get "quality software" by giving devs "ownership" of a piece of the software. And by ownership I mean they come back to it on every revision of the software. They add the new features, they fix its bugs ... they can burn it to the ground if they like for reasons of technical debt (or because they feel like it). "But what if that engineer leaves and no one else understands the code?" I hear you ask. So what. We're smart. Put someone smart on it and they'll have it figured out soon enough. Chesterton’s Fence be damned, if the new dev wants to burn it down, let them. You have to accept some risk in this field. But also you have to allow other's the responsibility. And in my experience, they'll rise to the occasion. The groups I was in that claimed to be Agile rotated devs around the project like, um, cogs.

ebiester 2y ago
I mean, that works if you give them ownership of the budget and revenue targets. That means if the product does not meet the revenue targets, the development team decreases and the development team has to decide which of their developers are losing their jobs. That way, when the dev wants to burn it down, they are playing with their own consequences. Autonomy comes with consequences.
- JKCalhoun 2y ago
  > Autonomy comes with consequences. Agree. And being allowed to embrace the consequences is, IMHO, how you get people to rise to their best.

gklitz 2y ago

Ironically “Holistic Development” reads like it’s just the agile manifesto rephrased to remove any mention of the customer.

rogerthis 2y ago

The idea seems to be to replace a set of empty keywords with another.

jonathaneunice 2y ago

"Agile is dead. Long live agile!" (But really, small-a agile has been ascendant, better, and preferred in many places for at least a decade. That or related takes on agility like Shape Up.)

Terretta 2y ago

What actually works are the development models proposed by Royce, the spiral model, DSDM, XP, and something like kanban (pull based) with the manifesto -- all based on the same core essentials: build to the outcome, prioritize learning, build through the unknowns, and deliver what you learned, all in a long term risk and long term RoE weighted way.* Scaled Agile for Enterprise (SAFE), SCRUM, etc., generally don't accomplish this. Any methods that take waterfall and relabel it and add roles until executives are bamboozled into thinking it's Agile™, don't. This is where waterfall probably came from: - Royce, 1970: https://www.praxisframework.org/files/royce1970.pdf https://www.praxisframework.org/files/royce1970.pdf While it's where "waterfall" came from, seems to be because someone stopped reading when they saw Figure 2. Figure 2 is what not to do, he says it doesn't work. By contrast, he already understands principles such as prototype what works then document it, then build it again (Fig 7 Step 3 says make one to throw away) or ski with your customer (Fig. 9 Step 5 says keep tight with the customer), etc. Myth has it the DOD got excited about Figure 2 and ran with it. Most damagingly misunderstood software development paper ever? - Spiral model: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spiral_model https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spiral_model Prototypes with iterative scope and rigor until it's good enough. Sound familiar? - DSDM: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_systems_development_method https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_systems_development_me... Look at the 8 principles and especially the core techniques... - XP: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extreme_programming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extreme_programming "Pairing" is why LLM code copilots "work". * Easy to say.

shalmanese 2y ago

We should just accept the euphemism treadmill is an iron law of the universe and every 10 years, we come up with a new term for insiders as the old term gets degraded. The problem now is people use "agile" to mean anything from the 2001 agile manifesto meaning of the term to the 2024 F500 meaning and that's too long a span of time so the word has lost all communicative value. You can either engage in a fool's errand trying to drag the word back to the original meaning or accepting reality and letting people have it and come up with some new term like "katana development" or some bullshit that means essentially the same thing. The "Observability" crew are good at this, I feel like every 10 years, there's a new coat of paint on essentially the same basic SRE concepts. Like how we went from Oriental to Asian American to AAPI, the mental burden of keeping up with these language changes serves as a basic shibboleth to who is paying attention enough to developments in the field.

Noujin 2y ago

OP I feel like you should quit your job now and find a better place.

elviejo 2y ago

Bertrand Meyer wrote a very good book called Agile: the good, the bad and the ugly. Which really, gives a good balanced view of the practices and the hype. Reading, is what removed the veil in my eyes.

deleted 2y ago

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jmloop 2y ago

Of course, Agile manifesto is bad so I create a new one. Now let's see if we can start making conferences, writing books and release new versions every year. Some teams don´t need Agile. In many products it doesn't make even sense to use it. I think we like to gather and discuss how to fix the world, but we know shit. The people that want to get the things done just need the resources (time, tools, money, etc). Facilitators, that should be the role of PMs.