Re:My 20-Year Experience of Software Development Methodologies
by TheCoelacanth on Monday December 04, 2017 @12:59PM
(#15845923)
If you can't do your rewrite in an incremental way, it is almost guaranteed to be a failure[1][2]. If you can make it two weeks without making any visible progress, you project is probably not on track for success. Granted, if your management thinks that they can get an entire multi-month project broken down into stories in advance, they have their heads up their asses.
[1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...
[2] https://codeahoy.com/2016/04/21/when-to-rewrite-from-scratch...
This articulates something that's been banging around in my head for a few years now. Agile always boils down to a series of waterfalls crashing down on each other, driven by a pool of tickets with no real consideration that some tasks can't be broken down or take more than 2 weeks to complete.
"I'd like to attempt to modernize of a codebase built up over 6+ years, so we can take advantage of technology which didn't exist then." "Yeah, can you break that down for me into tasks that can be done in a single sprint, preferably in parallel?" "Sure, give me a few months." "Yeah, can you break that into 2 week sprints too?"
Even if given the time to create those tasks, they would be put in the backlog behind a pile of feature requests that nobody actually needs. They would then be culled as "Won't Do", since the backlog has gotten too big.
</rant>