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You have to understand that some people make a good amount of money (5 figures or more) speaking at conferences like this. As a result, there's a cottage indust
by throwaway5752 12y ago
You have to understand that some people make a good amount of money (5 figures or more) speaking at conferences like this. As a result, there's a cottage industry of people trying to declare the "death of {sacred cow}" or "the end of {foundation of the field} as we know it". These are controversial and can result in speaking invitations. Obviously Dave Thomas is a little different, but he's still human. Note the silly pandering to the crowd - he's done this many times and knows how to work an audience.
Now, that said, Agile is fairly new as software engineering goes. It isn't that young of a field.. waterfall put man on the moon, after all. Agile particularly speaks to how one can remain somewhat stable while optimizing for velocity, and is particularly well suited for the type of businesses that have dominated the last 10-15 years: self hosted consumer applications or SaaS. The key to choosing a process is to understand what you are trying to optimize for and what sort of release process your project requires. Agile, for example, might not be the best solution for gamma knife firmware or embedded systems in cars. To give him the benefit of the doubt, perhaps he's reached the age of reflection and trying to emphasize that everyone should step back and consider their goals, and reevaluate their strategies in light of those goals. [edit: and understand a lot of people are lazy and/or risk-averse, and would prefer to think that there is a magic best practice, that if applied hard enough, will work for everything]
- sitkack 12y ago> waterfall put man on the moon As we learned with the Apollo Guidance Computer [0] and Shuttle computer systems development [1], the methodologies were not strictly waterfall. I'd like to do some more research in historical engineering techniques. I am not convinced that waterfall has had a much sway as the industry makes out. [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Hamilton_(scientist) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Hamilton_(scientist) [1] http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iterative_and_incremental_development http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iterative_and_incremental_dev...
- InclinedPlane 12y agoI think you might be laboring under some misapprehensions here. Are you aware who Dave Thomas truly is and his relation to "agile"? He's one of the co-signers of the original "agile manifesto". "Agile"is his baby as much as anyone's. And he's here to say that it's being misused and abused. He's not against agility, he's saying that what passes under the "agile" moniker today has very little to do with the original conception.
- throwaway5752 12y agoI was aware of that ("Obviously Dave Thomas is a little different"), and I first read the manifesto a long time ago. I've also used ThoughWork's Mingle, and he's accepted speaking money from one of the absolute worst offenders of get-in-your-way, process-over-progress APM crapware that exists. I watched the whole video, and I'm not impressed. Same old 'no true Scotsmen' crap that is epidemic to Agile. Yes, in almost 15 years, we are all still failing Agile instead of the other way around. Only now, it's gotten so bad it needs a new name. What he should realize that he doesn't like is complexity. If you have more than a thousand developers working together across multiple related product lines with various marketing, sales, and development dependencies then the 12 original principles and $2 will get you a bottle of soda. He shouldn't be mocking Agile in the Enterprise, he should be trying to figure out what is wrong/missing in Agile that causes it to become so pathological at scale.