Extensive discussion on agile yesterday under My 20-Year Experience of Software Development Methodologies | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15476357 (Oct 2017, 142+ comments)

>sytelus: The obvious problem is that these folks prescribing the development process are not active developers.

>mmcnl: The agile manifesto was in fact drafted by software developers. Also, agile doesn't prescribe any process at all, in fact, it does the opposite. Agile in essence is quite beautiful, unfortunately it gets twisted and turned upside down until it's just another methodology (which is exactly the opposite of its original meaning).

"Agile" should have stopped at the Agile Manifesto. The principles described there are useful. Scrum sounds good in theory but in reality I have never seen it really work. Mostly it devolved into a micromanagement tool.

I read this in the article, and had to wonder what on earth it had to do with making things:

If you are the scrum master, keep doing what you are doing. Keep coaching the development team on our core values of openness, commitment, focus, respect, and courage.

The scrum masters I have seen (including myself) turned quickly into bureaucrats that mainly managed deadlines. In theory the scrum master should constantly improve processes but from what I have seen they quickly get blocked by management and don't achieve much.

I jokingly called my last scrum master a "glorified assistant", he didn't like it.

You start out with great intentions but then you realize quickly that you have no authority at all. We had problems with our JIRA setup so I tried to buy a few hours with a consultant to set it up correctly. This request got declined so it was clear to the devs that I couldn't help with things. The only thing you have is tracking hours.

I've had the most conflict with team members who think "making things" is an end unto itself. Sometimes it is -- in your personal time, or if you're a researcher maybe, etc -- but in a business, making things is the means to an end. You need a methodology (scrum or something else) to keep the machine moving.

I'm still not sure how a manifesto with "Individuals and interactions over processes and tools" ended up as the scrum cult.

Huh, by-the-book scrum is the opposite of micromanagement.

That kind of scrum is a pretty elusive beast. I have never seen it.

I guess it depends on what you think micromanagement is. I know devs who think "you can work on any item in this list of things but no others" is micromanagement.

To a micromanager, everything is a micromanagement tool.

You can't use methodology (or a pointed lack thereof) to change personality.

Sure you can: the methodology is to not hire them in roles they can micromanage.

That's management methodology, not programming methodology.

Agile always comes off as if it were intended for small consultancy firms who do specific jobs for individual customers. That honestly doesn't sound like a place I'd ever like to work at. I'd rather work for a company that puts out mass-market products with near-monopoly status and takes a stance of "you'll take what we give you". Basically something like Microsoft or Adobe.

To me, agile is endless micromanagement. Tracking every little thing in JIRA and having constant pointless meetings. The next time I look for a job, I'm going to categorically rule out any company that uses JIRA at all.

And then there's a particular quality associated with agile that just comes off as cult-like. A while back, I was googling "scrum master" to find out what one actually did, and I stumbled on the official scrum page [0]. Some of the terminology on that page just jumps out at me saying "this is a cult" (in particular, the phrase "servant-leader" is used in an almost religious sense). If someone were to state what's on that page in real life, I'd start backing away slowly. And the cult-like feel is only reinforced by the agile community's peculiar use of ordinary words such as "story".

[0] https://www.scrum.org/resources/what-is-a-scrum-master

> To me, agile is endless micromanagement.

That is almost the exact opposite of agile. Unfortunately, the label "agile" gets pasted on some things that are very far from really being agile.

For this reason, be suspicious of anything labeled "agile". But don't automatically reject it - there is some real agile out there, and it's a whole different environment when it works.

The last company I worked at had officially switched to "agile" last year (even though in practice, it had been working that way since earlier). They sent some guy from the India office (halfway around the world) to discuss with the different scrum teams about "ceremonies", "retrospectives", and all kinds of similar BS. That definitely smells of a cult.

If a consultant was brought to a manufacturing facility to discuss ISO 9000, would that be culty too?

From the link:

> A scrum master cannot fail, only deliver unacceptable return on investment.

One of the best double-speak I've seen in years.

“You need to spend 20% of your sprint refactoring.”

Yes! Agility is largely a function of (the quality of) your code assets, so much more so than your team processes. And you can’t keep a code asset at quality unless through constant vigilance (ie, refactoring).

Now we only need to talk about who is doing the refactoring and what are their values?

The number "20%" scares me because people will makes his a hard rule. Soon you'll have to justify why you didn't refactor your stuff.

Or worse, I spent 1 hour writing it, so 15 minutes refactoring... And done, no more refactoring...

Agreed. I prefer the descriptive not prescriptive consideration here. Is refactoring an essential part of your process or no?

My guideline: Maintenance Monday! Just don't work on new features. Fires and old bugs only.

The real problem isn't Management style. Agile would be irrelevant if every programmer found it incredibly trivial to refactor huge portions of the program or very hard to introduce even one bug into the system....

We see a problem, we don't completely understand it, we think it's a problem with process but the same issues happen regardless of process, so then the issue must not be process... What's the common connection between all of this?

The complexity of code. Bugs, development time are directly related to coding style and coding technology and that is where the real issue lies.

The article author references martin fowler. Martin Fowler advocates a style of programming which makes it harder to refactor and easy to introduce bugs.

> The complexity of code. Bugs, development time are directly related to coding style and coding technology and that is where the real issue lies.

but this is not looked at by management at all. All they see is task with estimations on them. Estimations are then used to plan timelines and make a budget. It never takes into the tech defit into account. Agile projects almost always start of rosy, end up vague work never done state.

I invite folks to look at all methodologies within an overall CMM framework.

I fashioned a 90's Agile type methodology based on Release abstractions and project progress visibility.

There were always 3 Releases (MRTP - Multi-Release Technology Plan) for parking inbound feature requests from inbound stakeholders. Developers shared "minds eyes" on future releases.

Then we group scheduled integration deliverables (not activities) by Weeks. Rare deliverables were given longer extensions. Sharing a spreadsheet of weekly deliverables to the next release required enough analysis to share the schedule abstraction.

Going dark was impossible. Everyone documented short "So Far, More To Go, Defer It" lists with short rationales similar to version control commit comments. We could push schedule breaking "features" to future releases. Every Thursday was integration and retime boxing of the schedule. The dev notes were collated into report "Weeklies." In practice, more continuous integrations were daily to his weekly hard integration targets.

The methodology started with a workbook of about 15 product planning exercises from User "day in the life" to "operational cost estimate" spreadsheet formalisms.

In practice developers shared a subset of the planning formalism "intermediate representations." But all stakeholders (business too) were fully aware and SIGNED ON to every planning step skipped for schedule or cost necessities.

It was very ritual high visibility human applied "design by contract." We had a perfect execution record on early Linux tooling with teams from 2-15 (Product Planners, Information Architect, Soft Devs, System Architects) on about 125 high pressure engagements. Most was a mix of Java Servlet, SMTP and C telecoms projects. We had to write our protocol handlers back then on shifting sand.

I might write it up as "The Adrenaline Way." It doesn't easily apply to individual, exploratory or Kanban content "journey without a destination" project teams. But it applies well to products with inbound and outbound marketing teams involved.

Where can I read this without logging into LinkedIn?

I was able to just close & re-open the link, the second time there is no login prompt.

Thanks, it worked on the second try.

> Defer decisions until the last possible moment. Wait until you have all the information you can get – you’ll make better choices. If you make a decision too early, you may get it wrong.

I cannot disagree more with this. You should make decisions as soon as you have a minimal amount of data. If you keep waiting the last possible moment, you will get a product that is the product of the least possible time.

If you make a decision too late, you have 100% failed.

Err no. Agile really is multiple things to different stake holders. To devs agile is something completely different from Project Managers or Customers.

Customers see it as a really fast, transparent and easy way to run projects

Project Managers see it as a way to keep track on a projects at a high level view and mostly for metrics and reporting

Project leaders use it to assign tasks to minions

Minions see it as a way to work independently without looking at the big picture.

Who is looking at the big picture? nobody. that's why agile fails.

Text-only link for those who can't be bothered with LinkedIn:

https://pastebin.com/Pq0T3Krs

Defer decisions until the last moment possible is one of the best things to do when making a tough decision. Its weird how we praise "quick decision makers." They are more or less simply gambling. Information tends to grow exponentially overtime. By waiting your chances of making a sound decision increase.

"Information tends to grow exponentially overtime. " Maybe true. However, the opportunity cost of playing the waiting game also tends to follow a similar path.

That's true. But any investor/CEO/Business owner will tell you: It's better to be late and right, than to be early and wrong.

What happened to fail fast? ;)

What is this "Rework" book he refers to? I can only find the book of the same name of Jason Fried and DHH on Amazon...

that's probably the book they mean.

Oh.

"the body of knowledge in those tomes" threw me off - quite the opposite of Rework.