6 ms·

The road to hell is paved with agile intentions

50 points by cateye 13y ago

al2o3cr 13y ago
"The market is full of similar providers with readymade products for a fixed price." In my experience, the market is full of people who CLAIM to have "readymade products" and who will ASSURE you that they'll be available for a fixed price. Neither statement is typically true, however - nor is the idea that even "simple" client problems can be solved without any custom work. If your firm's clients get mad when an agile process and its risks are explained, what they're really pissed about is that you won't lie to their faces during the sales process anymore...
- dustingetz 13y ago
  wallets speak louder than words, and if your clients pay you more than once, they're telling you that you're giving them what they want. Notably, that means that you aren't lying, in their eyes.
platz 13y ago
Scrum is not a process? Too vauge.. Also the solution always seems to be inappropriate skills of the developers
- nziceman 13y ago
  Problems with any process can come down to the skill level of developers, but more importantly their attitude and team fit. For example, if you have a team of like minded developers (with the right attitude), at about the same level. You can give them any process and call it what you want, and they'll achieve what they set out to achieve. And vise versa, you can have a team of dysfunctional developers and give them any process - yet they'll most likely fail to achieve what they set out for. Oh, and replace process with framework if that helps...
- cateye 13y ago
  From the official Scrum guide: "Scrum is not a process or a technique for building products; rather, it is a framework within which you can employ various processes and techniques." https://www.scrum.org/Portals/0/Documents/Scrum%20Guides/Scrum_Guide.pdf https://www.scrum.org/Portals/0/Documents/Scrum%20Guides/Scr... These are just some examples that wrong causes can get attributed. And yes, a lot of times there is a mismatch between the skills and the expectations of the developers. (Without judgment where the error is.)
  - benjaminwootton 13y ago
    I find that surprising. I view Agile as the framework, and SCRUM as a specific instance of an agile process. With SCRUM dictating that you should have X meetings of Y hours length producing artifacts A, B, C, that sounds like a process to me....
CookWithMe 13y ago
> This company faces the problem that customers often complain about a lack of clarity about the process and insufficient quality of the produced websites. > The department has understaffing and the requests are piling up. The waiting times are very high and there are many complaints. Sounds like they just paved a new road IN hell, not TO hell...
wpietri 13y ago
I certainly grant that the faddishness of Agile methods is a giant problem, and I've grumbled about that before. [1] But I'm not quite getting his point here. I agree that wholesale adoption of Agile methods is problematic. But one thing every Agile approach has in common is an inspect-and-adapt component, so I'd call wholesale, ritualistic adoption essentially un-Agile. The Extreme Programming people are most explicit about this: they say that by-the-book XP is a good place to start, but that they don't expect anybody to stay there. But when I read his examples, it seems like he doesn't know that. (Or perhaps that's the people in his examples.) Agile approaches aren't supposed to make everything better. They're supposed to expose the problems with how you're working so you can fix them. In the first case, it exposed the client's lack of interest and the conflicts of interest inherent in their organization. In the second, it made clear that the backlog was unreasonably large versus staff size. Those aren't unintended consequences of adopting Agile methods. That's what's supposed to happen. Hidden problems are now obvious, which is progress. He seems to suggest that more planning is the solution, but I think just the opposite: with both those fictional shops I'd encourage them to fix the visible problems, and try to do so in ways that shorten feedback loops and help surface other hidden issues. [1] http://agilefocus.com/2011/02/21/agiles-second-chasm-and-how-we-fell-in/ http://agilefocus.com/2011/02/21/agiles-second-chasm-and-how...
- cateye 13y ago
  The problem is that such an organizational change not just exposes the problem: it makes it worse. The intention also usually isn't "let's make things visible". So, the unintended consequence is that things are amplified. And no, in such a situation this will not feel like progress. I don't suggest more planning. I suggest more profound thinking before changing things. Edit: you edited your comment.
  - amouat 13y ago
    But why pick on Agile? The organisations clearly had problems that needed to be addressed which went beyond software methodologies. Should they choose a waterfall development model because it might hide the problems better in the short term? I agree that more thought may be required. But that has nothing to do with Agile. If anything Agile should be commended for bringing the problems into focus.
pnathan 13y ago
The point being made is that the total system of an organization must be thought about and considered before adopting a new thing. Simply focusing on one thing only will not magically make everything better. Root causes must be addressed and symptoms relieved for the total system to function more smoothly.
DanielBMarkham 13y ago
I'm happy to upvote authors who want to talk about making the work environment better for everybody. But I'll also add that in my opinion this is a poorly structured essay. The crux of the problem with process is premature generalization. People see a couple, or 4-5 examples of something, and then want to make a rule for all projects in an organization. There's waaaaaay too much variance for it to work like that. Readers face a similar problem when reading about success in startups. There's a ton of books on how to make a killer startup -- but most all of them rely on a few examples or a handful of stories. They're long on selection bias and short on usefulness. Orgs do this same thing all the time. There's also a mismatch in the model many technologist bring to organizing the work and the work itself. Since we work with things that move data around and functions that perform data changes, we begin to feel that a well-run organization is built on certain data and functions. It's simply the analogy that is most convenient for us. In reality, we're finding psychological and social factors are playing a much more important role than sets of rules, processes, or data structured and handled in certain ways. This is a big change for many to accept. Still, always good to hear more voices. It continues to amaze me how you can take a kick-ass team of 5 guys and conquer the world. You can then scale that up to a kick-ass team of 100 guys -- and create one of the most miserable work experiences ever. Shameless plug: for those interested in reading some of the stuff I've written about this, check out my blog devoted to the topic: http://tiny-giant-books.com/blog http://tiny-giant-books.com/blog
kabdib 13y ago
I've been in groups where the management has said: "Guess what! We're going to be Agile and do Scrum!" Whereupon they sent a bunch of PMs off to be trained as Scrum masters. On the first project, Management then said: "Okay, go do that Agile stuff. And we think it will take you 13 sprints. Also, here's the stuff you'll be doing in the first sprint..." Soon after, there were daily management meetings where people's burn-down rates were being discussed, based on the daily status reports that the PMs were collecting. Just another way to micromanage people.
- wsc981 13y ago
  > "Just another way to micromanage people." I share the same sentiment. And I hate to be micromanaged. In a previous job a manager actually admitted to me that agile was a means to get more control over the developers and approach software development more like factory work, instead of creative work. A few months later I decided to leave, cause I need some sort of creativity in my approach to work, and for creativity I need freedom, not constraints.
  - UK-AL 13y ago
    I really like agile precisely because of this. I get tasks given to me, and I can prove the amount of work I have done. Without metrics, you can end up at whim of managers gut feeling rather than what actually has been done.
- benjaminwootton 13y ago
  SCRUM was once described to me as micro-management without the managers :)
  - kabdib 13y ago
    Scrum is what good developers seem to do naturally anyway. They plan a little, and talk. I think that larger projects need more planning than Scrum, but if you look at Scrum's successes you'll see they are largely on projects where a lot of similar prior work had been done. In a sense, the design and up-front thiking came "for free". You usually can't get away with that on something that hasn't been done before.
gesman 13y ago
Creating, optimizing and tuning "processes" with a help of buzzword bullshit is a bread and butter using which the certain layers of management justifies their, otherwise worthless existence. Developers often find themselves interrupted by needs to participate in processes that are necessary to "track or improve the progress" instead of focusing on making the actual progress happen.
- ebiester 13y ago
  It depends. Is an hour meeting every other week saying, "We tried thing A, it went badly. Let's modify A or stop doing it, instead trying thing B." At the end of a project, do an overall retrospective, and perhaps make changes for the next project. Small, incremental experiments and changes are great for process improvement. They can even feed up the chain and promote cross-team experiments, so long as there isn't a top-down directive to implement new thing B at the same time. Do experiments, keep what works, discard what doesn't.
- UK-AL 13y ago
  Its not about tracking for the sake of tracking. Its about finding problems in the development process and improving them. Its helps identify problems, and once identified you can make adjustments and fix it. In our sprints people can 'flag' stories if something is slowing them down, and normally you find it's consistent issue with multiple stories. If you remove it, then you have a instant productivity boost. When we implemented scrum we found a lot of stories were going back and forth between requirements and development stages, so we knew where the problem was. It's also about guidance. The people implementing the project, probably don't have accurate representation of customer value, only the customer does. Teams often have vision of how things should be, but normally its inaccurate and you implement things with the wrong priorities. The constant feedback from the customer helps ensure the right things are being worked on.
charlieflowers 13y ago
The fix for a dysfunctional bureaucratic organization full of in-fighting is not a better software development process. How it usually plays out is that switching to a better software process is a tiny step in the right direction, but the organization is still dysfunctional and bureaucratic. (Analogy: the person whose body was riddled with stage 4 cancer started flossing every day. She still died of cancer soon after, but her teeth were cleaner).

50 points by cateye 13y ago

"The market is full of similar providers with readymade products for a fixed price." In my experience, the market is full of people who CLAIM to have "readymade products" and who will ASSURE you that they'll be available for a fixed price. Neither statement is typically true, however - nor is the idea that even "simple" client problems can be solved without any custom work. If your firm's clients get mad when an agile process and its risks are explained, what they're really pissed about is that you won't lie to their faces during the sales process anymore...

dustingetz 13y ago
wallets speak louder than words, and if your clients pay you more than once, they're telling you that you're giving them what they want. Notably, that means that you aren't lying, in their eyes.

platz 13y ago

Scrum is not a process? Too vauge.. Also the solution always seems to be inappropriate skills of the developers

nziceman 13y ago
Problems with any process can come down to the skill level of developers, but more importantly their attitude and team fit. For example, if you have a team of like minded developers (with the right attitude), at about the same level. You can give them any process and call it what you want, and they'll achieve what they set out to achieve. And vise versa, you can have a team of dysfunctional developers and give them any process - yet they'll most likely fail to achieve what they set out for. Oh, and replace process with framework if that helps...
cateye 13y ago
From the official Scrum guide: "Scrum is not a process or a technique for building products; rather, it is a framework within which you can employ various processes and techniques." https://www.scrum.org/Portals/0/Documents/Scrum%20Guides/Scrum_Guide.pdf https://www.scrum.org/Portals/0/Documents/Scrum%20Guides/Scr... These are just some examples that wrong causes can get attributed. And yes, a lot of times there is a mismatch between the skills and the expectations of the developers. (Without judgment where the error is.)
- benjaminwootton 13y ago
  I find that surprising. I view Agile as the framework, and SCRUM as a specific instance of an agile process. With SCRUM dictating that you should have X meetings of Y hours length producing artifacts A, B, C, that sounds like a process to me....

CookWithMe 13y ago

> This company faces the problem that customers often complain about a lack of clarity about the process and insufficient quality of the produced websites. > The department has understaffing and the requests are piling up. The waiting times are very high and there are many complaints. Sounds like they just paved a new road IN hell, not TO hell...

wpietri 13y ago

I certainly grant that the faddishness of Agile methods is a giant problem, and I've grumbled about that before. [1] But I'm not quite getting his point here. I agree that wholesale adoption of Agile methods is problematic. But one thing every Agile approach has in common is an inspect-and-adapt component, so I'd call wholesale, ritualistic adoption essentially un-Agile. The Extreme Programming people are most explicit about this: they say that by-the-book XP is a good place to start, but that they don't expect anybody to stay there. But when I read his examples, it seems like he doesn't know that. (Or perhaps that's the people in his examples.) Agile approaches aren't supposed to make everything better. They're supposed to expose the problems with how you're working so you can fix them. In the first case, it exposed the client's lack of interest and the conflicts of interest inherent in their organization. In the second, it made clear that the backlog was unreasonably large versus staff size. Those aren't unintended consequences of adopting Agile methods. That's what's supposed to happen. Hidden problems are now obvious, which is progress. He seems to suggest that more planning is the solution, but I think just the opposite: with both those fictional shops I'd encourage them to fix the visible problems, and try to do so in ways that shorten feedback loops and help surface other hidden issues. [1] http://agilefocus.com/2011/02/21/agiles-second-chasm-and-how-we-fell-in/ http://agilefocus.com/2011/02/21/agiles-second-chasm-and-how...

cateye 13y ago
The problem is that such an organizational change not just exposes the problem: it makes it worse. The intention also usually isn't "let's make things visible". So, the unintended consequence is that things are amplified. And no, in such a situation this will not feel like progress. I don't suggest more planning. I suggest more profound thinking before changing things. Edit: you edited your comment.
- amouat 13y ago
  But why pick on Agile? The organisations clearly had problems that needed to be addressed which went beyond software methodologies. Should they choose a waterfall development model because it might hide the problems better in the short term? I agree that more thought may be required. But that has nothing to do with Agile. If anything Agile should be commended for bringing the problems into focus.

pnathan 13y ago

The point being made is that the total system of an organization must be thought about and considered before adopting a new thing. Simply focusing on one thing only will not magically make everything better. Root causes must be addressed and symptoms relieved for the total system to function more smoothly.

DanielBMarkham 13y ago

I'm happy to upvote authors who want to talk about making the work environment better for everybody. But I'll also add that in my opinion this is a poorly structured essay. The crux of the problem with process is premature generalization. People see a couple, or 4-5 examples of something, and then want to make a rule for all projects in an organization. There's waaaaaay too much variance for it to work like that. Readers face a similar problem when reading about success in startups. There's a ton of books on how to make a killer startup -- but most all of them rely on a few examples or a handful of stories. They're long on selection bias and short on usefulness. Orgs do this same thing all the time. There's also a mismatch in the model many technologist bring to organizing the work and the work itself. Since we work with things that move data around and functions that perform data changes, we begin to feel that a well-run organization is built on certain data and functions. It's simply the analogy that is most convenient for us. In reality, we're finding psychological and social factors are playing a much more important role than sets of rules, processes, or data structured and handled in certain ways. This is a big change for many to accept. Still, always good to hear more voices. It continues to amaze me how you can take a kick-ass team of 5 guys and conquer the world. You can then scale that up to a kick-ass team of 100 guys -- and create one of the most miserable work experiences ever. Shameless plug: for those interested in reading some of the stuff I've written about this, check out my blog devoted to the topic: http://tiny-giant-books.com/blog http://tiny-giant-books.com/blog

kabdib 13y ago

I've been in groups where the management has said: "Guess what! We're going to be Agile and do Scrum!" Whereupon they sent a bunch of PMs off to be trained as Scrum masters. On the first project, Management then said: "Okay, go do that Agile stuff. And we think it will take you 13 sprints. Also, here's the stuff you'll be doing in the first sprint..." Soon after, there were daily management meetings where people's burn-down rates were being discussed, based on the daily status reports that the PMs were collecting. Just another way to micromanage people.

wsc981 13y ago
> "Just another way to micromanage people." I share the same sentiment. And I hate to be micromanaged. In a previous job a manager actually admitted to me that agile was a means to get more control over the developers and approach software development more like factory work, instead of creative work. A few months later I decided to leave, cause I need some sort of creativity in my approach to work, and for creativity I need freedom, not constraints.
- UK-AL 13y ago
  I really like agile precisely because of this. I get tasks given to me, and I can prove the amount of work I have done. Without metrics, you can end up at whim of managers gut feeling rather than what actually has been done.
benjaminwootton 13y ago
SCRUM was once described to me as micro-management without the managers :)
- kabdib 13y ago
  Scrum is what good developers seem to do naturally anyway. They plan a little, and talk. I think that larger projects need more planning than Scrum, but if you look at Scrum's successes you'll see they are largely on projects where a lot of similar prior work had been done. In a sense, the design and up-front thiking came "for free". You usually can't get away with that on something that hasn't been done before.

gesman 13y ago

Creating, optimizing and tuning "processes" with a help of buzzword bullshit is a bread and butter using which the certain layers of management justifies their, otherwise worthless existence. Developers often find themselves interrupted by needs to participate in processes that are necessary to "track or improve the progress" instead of focusing on making the actual progress happen.

ebiester 13y ago
It depends. Is an hour meeting every other week saying, "We tried thing A, it went badly. Let's modify A or stop doing it, instead trying thing B." At the end of a project, do an overall retrospective, and perhaps make changes for the next project. Small, incremental experiments and changes are great for process improvement. They can even feed up the chain and promote cross-team experiments, so long as there isn't a top-down directive to implement new thing B at the same time. Do experiments, keep what works, discard what doesn't.
UK-AL 13y ago
Its not about tracking for the sake of tracking. Its about finding problems in the development process and improving them. Its helps identify problems, and once identified you can make adjustments and fix it. In our sprints people can 'flag' stories if something is slowing them down, and normally you find it's consistent issue with multiple stories. If you remove it, then you have a instant productivity boost. When we implemented scrum we found a lot of stories were going back and forth between requirements and development stages, so we knew where the problem was. It's also about guidance. The people implementing the project, probably don't have accurate representation of customer value, only the customer does. Teams often have vision of how things should be, but normally its inaccurate and you implement things with the wrong priorities. The constant feedback from the customer helps ensure the right things are being worked on.

charlieflowers 13y ago

The fix for a dysfunctional bureaucratic organization full of in-fighting is not a better software development process. How it usually plays out is that switching to a better software process is a tiny step in the right direction, but the organization is still dysfunctional and bureaucratic. (Analogy: the person whose body was riddled with stage 4 cancer started flossing every day. She still died of cancer soon after, but her teeth were cleaner).