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A community and forum to discuss and learn Agile Project Management
- tdicola 12y agoThis should be stickied at the top: http://www.thoughtworks.com/talks/the-death-of-agile http://www.thoughtworks.com/talks/the-death-of-agile
- michaelochurch 12y ago"Agile" is fucking terrible. It's an attempt to patch business-driven engineering, which is like spraying perfume on a turd in an attempt to make it smell good. Fuck user stories and fuck "iterations"/"sprints" and fuck "you can only work on it if it's in the backlog" and fuck story points and fuck all the meetings ("sprint retrospective meetings" that go on for 2 hours; how the fuck is that agile?) and fuck this culture of enabling indecisive businessmen by tolerating incoherent, rapidly-changing requirements and fuck this idea that programmers (even with 5-10+ years of experience) are supposed to be terminal juniors and be fucking happy about it. I'm all for genuine agility but this cottage industry of developer fungibility and ritualized micromanagement needs to die in a fucking taint fire.
- joshrivers 12y agoI love you michealochurch.
- confiscate 12y agolol me 2
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- wmeredith 12y agoLots of piss and vinegar here, but little that's constructive. What's the alternative? Waterfall? Chaos?
- michaelochurch 12y agoWaterfall is a straw man. Waterfall and agile are two possibilities within business-driven engineering (a euphemism for "you just code what we tell you to do, we make the decisions"). I don't think Scrum is that terrible for junior engineers, but it provides no exit. It's the terminal juniorness of it that has me bothered. I'm 31 years old and have been programming for almost a decade and I'm too old to work on "user stories". No, I don't mean "because of age, I'm too good to work on it" because that would be bullshit; if it needs to be done and I'm the best person to do it, then I'm not "too good" to work on anything. I mean that, at age 31, if all I have to show for my time is a disjointed collection of "user stories", no one will take me seriously. If you're any good, programming evolves into an R&D job after 5 years: exploring new technologies, testing new architectures, building whole products and company-wide initiatives. Ideologies like Scrum are trying to take that away from us. They probably provide some useful structure for junior programmers, but they're alienating to senior talent.
- maxerickson 12y agoHow many people have you managed? How many projects have you conceived and carried through to shipping? How many of them are profitable? I suppose Fermi estimates would be fine. Those questions maybe have a snide undertone to them, that isn't my intent with asking them. You post confident rants about how businesses should operate, and I'm curious how much the above experience informs those rants.
- fsk 12y agoThat is a valid point. If you're so awesome, then why not start your own business and clobber all those people who do stupid stuff like Agile and Scrum? I am slowly working towards this on my own, trying to get a personal side project to the point where I can do it full-time. I'm just starting and only spending a couple hours a week on it. They used to be doing poorly-implemented Scrum where I work now, and I'm glad they dropped it. Having a daily 30 minute status report meeting that never started on time was killing almost an hour of productivity per day.
- caminante 12y agoWhy do you need another forum to discuss Agile? I fear that michaelochurch's point that a taint fire's needed is appropriate.