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The "argument" is that making software is an ugly, brutish affairs in virtually every case, with virtually every approach. There are extraordinarily few cases t
by irrigation 11y ago
The "argument" is that making software is an ugly, brutish affairs in virtually every case, with virtually every approach. There are extraordinarily few cases throughout history where a team converged, looked at the problem, built a solution, and voila, everyone emerged happy. In the real world there is always a discord between requirements and reality, skillsets and the problem space, change management and the need for rapid change, scope creep, and on and on.
It is the story of every software project everywhere throughout time.
But invariably the comments will fill with tales of woe with agile (usually with people betraying a complete lack of understanding of it, as an aside, such as seen with most uses of the term "scrum" throughout these discussions. It serves as the canary in the coal mine when noxious gases are afoot), as if troubled projects are some unique reality of agile. They're a reality of every single methodology. Agile merely tries to help reduce a few of the bigger and most deadly issues, which are friction with the business (the ability to adapt to change), and enormous investments of time and money to a project that ends up being a solution to the wrong problem. It doesn't suddenly make everyone cooperative and great.
As to my "misunderstand", so the solution as you see it is just to have developers that work well together. Easy peasie solution.
- lawl 11y agoOnce again. > Because the classical model failed agile can't fail too? > so the solution as you see it is just to have developers that work well together. Easy peasie solution. No one said it's easy. No one said you can just have it. No one claims it's the solution to how we build software. > usually with people betraying a complete lack of understanding of it, as an aside, such as seen with most uses of the term "scrum" throughout these discussions Why don't you just tell me you think I completely lack understanding of the subject matter?
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- derriz 11y agoThe beauty of Agile is: if you question or criticize it, you don't understand it; if it didn't work for you, you didn't apply it properly; if you applied it rigorously and it failed, you didn't have a deep understanding of it. Was it Sartre who said "it is what it is not"?
- dudifordMann 11y agoAgile is not an "it", agile is not static. Application of agile principals means guiding and improving development processes. This is not a damned if you do damned if you don't scenario. As the article suggested, you have to "inspect and adapt". If something did not work for you, then capture the results, perform a lesson's learned, and try again. To say "apply agile methods", is to apply a nimbleness of the mind. This is where not everyone "gets it" right away. If someone suggests a paradigm shift from what you as a developer are accustomed to, you may very well fall flat on your face. But to apply agile methods means to be able to get back up and try a different approach.
- collyw 11y agoThe very definition of agile seems itself to be very "agile" and constantly changing depending on the discussion.
- mreiland 11y agoYou've created a strawman to attack by citing waterfall. Stop citing waterfall as the reason for agile methodologies. It's like citing the lack of evidence for a christian God as the reason Science exists instead of pointing out how effective science has been in helping us control our environment. And if you can't describe how effective Agile has been, then have you no reason for your opinion outside of religious views. Which is ok if it works for you, but don't attack a strawman as a way of dismissing other people's experiences.
- irrigation 11y agoSpeaking of strawmen, where did I cite waterfall? The entire foundation of your post is a fiction. Software is tough. It is always, and has always been tough. The same flexibility that is the great benefit of the domain is also its curse. This is true across any methodology, so try not to project your own hangups into that statement. Agile is something that some shops try to do, imperfectly, against that reality. Every one of these angry anti-agile comments seem to opine that agile is terrible versus some mythical alternative that is shapeless and amorphous, boiled down to "have a great team". That is, quite simply, nonsense. It is the pat solution of the bottom feeder. Religious views? Again, the entire foundation of the anti-agile screed, which is generally by people with a chip on their shoulder (and they probably had a chip on their shoulder about everything that people with more influence over them got adopted) is that it is deficient compared with an unspoken, unstated alternative. And I'm the one bringing religion in this? Christ.
- mreiland 11y agoI may have responded to the wrong person (or you've edited your post) as the post I meant to respond to was most definitely comparing waterfall to agile. It's very common for agile proponents to push Waterfall as the necessary alternative to agile, but that's a logical fallacy.
- stream_fusion 11y ago> In the real world there is always a discord between requirements and reality, skillsets and the problem space, change management and the need for rapid change, scope creep, and on and on. We follow Agile. At the beginning of iteration planning, the dev-team, has to task-out the items and score the complexity, and then decide the cut-off point as to what can and cannot be achieved within the 2 week iteration. It's taken us several years, but this ruthless cycle of feedback, and responsibility has led us to a point, where we scope it right about 75% of the time. Having also been involved in projects that have overrun deliverable dates by years - I wouldn't have believed it possible for a software-management process to work so well. Of course it helps, that there is genuine philosophical buy-in, and that our revenue is derived from our software (eg. we're not a cost-centre).