I once had it used against me to justify not writing tests ("processes and tools!"). We had meetings about bugs instead. Seriously. Complain all you like about perversion, that was a perfectly valid interpretation coz those hallowed commandments are, frankly, ill-defined bollocks.

The principles are better but still suffer the same problem. If the most efficient way to convey information in a dev team is face to face why don't you come over here and I'll whisper my pull request in your ear. Jesus.

There's no point complaining about the perversion of a thing that was never very specific about what it wanted to be in the first place.

Once people (especially managers) get specific about what agile means to them it turns out it means very different things to different people. This is entirely the fault of the originators.

One benefit of Scrum (the catholic church to agile's christian sect) was that it was proscriptive and was specific. Unfortunately it's also a bit shit and its practitioner-priests LOVE to tell you that if it isnt working, well, You Probably Just Weren't Doing It Correctly.

thank you, Thank You, THANK YOU!

It is a useless set of vague platitudes which offered nothing but a sense of seeming aphoristic depth. How so many people fell for it is still a mystery to me. Instead of focusing on the core problem of Requirements gathering and Software Specification, well known trial-and-error approaches were dressed up as something profound and a whole industry was created out of thin air. People seem to have forgotten the works of Fred Brooks/Barry Boehm and that their iterative "Spiral Model" IS Agile. There is nothing new i could find in the "modern" Agile/Scrum movement except mindless emphasis on Processes/Tools which is insanity, eg; The position of "Scrum Master" is the very definition of a "Bullshit Job" and should be abolished forthwith.

Where I work there was a huge shift in this.

From Business analysts (BA), who usually had comp sci or engineering degrees, and an expectation to get PMP and CBAP / PMI-PBA / other BA certification to move up, were responsible for requirements.

Now we have product managers and scrum masters with a 1-3 day agile certification and no comp sci or engineering background who are responsible for requirements.

Nothing is worse than non-domain knowledgeable, non-technical people lording it over actual Technical Engineers who do the work.

I always recommend Dave Packard's 1960 "Speech to HP Managers" to every "Manager" - https://gizmodo.com/the-hp-way-how-bill-hewlett-and-i-built-...

Relevant Excerpt:

Over the years we have developed the policy that it is important for the supervisor to thoroughly know and understand the work of his group. A debate on this has been carried on by management people for years. Some say you can be a good manager without having the slightest idea of what you are trying to manage, that the techniques of management are all important. There are many organizations which work that way. I don't argue that the job can't be done that way but I do argue strongly that the best job can be done when the manager or supervisor has a real and genuine understanding of his group's work. I don't see how a person can even understand what proper standards are and what performance is required unless he does understand in some detail the very specific nature of the work he is trying to supervise. We have held closely to this philosophy and we intend to continue to do so. We expect you who are supervising to learn techniques of supervision and keep up to date. I want to emphasize you can supervise best when you know a great deal about the work you are supervising and when you know the techniques of supervision as well.

This is how great companies were built.

At least the Church only had confession once a week in private.

And treat this comment as an acknowledgement for all future occasions on which I quote you.

I wish I could upvote this more.

Then you're just complaining about the nature of language, because people do the same thing with religious text, literary text, the law, contracts, even daily conversations and flirtations. This is hardly a point that you can hold against the Agile manifesto.

> I once had it used against me to justify not writing tests

If you thought of your work as a complex system where there are a lot of variables which have multiple underlying causes, then you would have been able to describe some undesirable effect as being heavily caused by not having writing tests. And really, this is why people don't get Agile--they don't see their work and their organization as a complex system.

Funnily enough the features of language which are ideally suited for flirtation and writing poetry and preaching religion or nationalism and other such "let your fantasy go wild and fill in the gaps" uses of language aren't as appropriate when you're doing engineering.

Law and contracts ARE different (more like engineering), incidentally. What is described as "legalese" actually exists because non-legal equivalent language is often insufficiently precise and subject to dangerous and costly misinterpretation. Mathematical discussion has the same problem to such an extreme degree that it's almost pointless using English at all most of the time.

>And really, this is why people don't get Agile

The reason people say "people don't get Agile" is because they don't get that when the manifesto flirted with them it encouraged them to fill in the gaps with their own idealized version of software development that wasn't necessarily shared by everyone else.

Yeah but that's not the point that I'm making, is it? What I'm saying is that people project their own meanings into language all the time regardless of whether the language is being used in deeply personal interactions or in professional settings; therefore you can't just fault the Agile manifesto for its supposed "ambiguity".

On the point re: how laws and contracts are different -- sure, these things have gotten more precise over time, but if the language of law was inherently precise then we wouldn't have a need for judges and courts and congresses. Heck, even mathematics isn't safe from the problem of the imprecision of language. Wasn't there a time just in the last year or two when people were debating about the correctness of the statement, "one plus one always equals two"?

Which, really, brings us to the ultimate question, which also happens to be my response to your last sentence:

> The reason people say "people don't get Agile" is because they don't get that when the manifesto flirted with them it encouraged them to fill in the gaps with their own idealized version of software development that wasn't necessarily shared by everyone else.

So then is it a problem with the manifesto or with the people?

That was MY point.

>therefore you can't just fault the Agile manifesto for its supposed "ambiguity".

You absolutely can. They didn't have to write it in an obtuse, ambiguous and metaphorical way that practically required people to project their own meaning. They deliberately chose to.

Scrum is a clear example of a methodology that is relatively (not completely) unambiguous. It's describing (in theory) a much more concrete form of "aspirational agile" and as such is at a lower risk of becoming all religious.

>On the point re: how laws and contracts are different -- sure, these things have gotten more precise over time, but if the language of law was inherently precise then we wouldn't have a need for judges and courts and congresses. Heck, even mathematics isn't safe from the problem of the imprecision of language. Wasn't there a time just in the last year or two when people were debating about the correctness of the statement, "one plus one always equals two"?

It's a sliding scale. Flirting and poetry is way over on the far left with the agile manifesto. Scrum is further to the right. Legalese is further still to the right. Math further still. It's fairly self-evident that the level of specificity required in the language used varies depending on the task. Being too specific when you flirt is common sitcom grist and nobody's ever made poetry out of a shopping list.

>Which, really, brings us to the ultimate question, which also happens to be my response to your last sentence: So then is it a problem with the manifesto or with the people?

It's the manifesto.

Beautifully said, you have a way with words!

The outputs they seek are emergent.

You also belittle scrum for becoming too specific.

Seems you’re still processing what to make of any of it.

Knowledge work is immaterial and should have no prescribed rails or all you get is run of the mill outputs.

It’s similar to business; billions have been spent investigating what technology or management style brought the biggest gains. The math quickly becomes so Byzantine there no meaningful conclusions.

No matter how detailed our consciousness will let us imagine, there’s still one reality ruled by physics. Esoteric math may be correct in that it has the order of operations right, but that truth doesn’t give it any real influence on physical reality.

Yes they were. The cynical side of me says that this was because they were purposefully trying to create a rallying cry or something akin to a religion to better sell their wares and were unconcerned about the fallout that would ensue.

The less cynical side of me says they did it because they came up with "extreme programming" and knew that a lot of it was kind of bullshit, disagreed with each other on the details, but wanted some way to push people in "that sort of direction".

The net result either way was... well, a kind of religion.

>You also belittle scrum for becoming too specific.

No, I didn't belittle scrum for being specific. It's one of the good things about it. It is, however, a specifically defined bad way of running a team. We do need designed processes as specific as scrum, that are less one-size-fits-all and that have a more systematic and refined approach to software quality, estimation and design.

"Scrumban" is definitely an improvement, but even that is still lacking.

I'd like to see software team processes treated in many respects as a kind of "software to run teams", specifically meaning:

* That it gets iterated frequently and responds to feedback at every level (not just team, but philosophically - by its founders).

* That it's clearly and precisely defined.

* That there are a variety of different config switches depending on circumstances (e.g. number of people, skill distribution, are you building CRM or flying space rockets, etc.).

* That the individual pieces (e.g. retros, sprint planning) can be chopped and changed and upgraded/iterated on individually and yet still couple to each other sensibly - akin to the UNIX philosophy.

>Knowledge work is immaterial and should have no prescribed rails

No, anarchy is no good either.

> they came up with "extreme programming" and knew that a lot of it was kind of bullshit, disagreed with each other on the details

Money quotes!

I had attended a presentation by Kent Beck on "eXtreme Programming" well before the Agile/Scrum movement started and came away with the exact sentiments listed above.

Anarchy is no good.

Haha.

Your efforts are constrained by physical science, social objectives.

There’s plenty of structure to prevent anarchy.

But you would further impose problem solving constraints on others thought work.

Shit n hellfire; what a dumpster fire of a culture.

Would you say something as minimal as “E=mc^2” promotes anarchy? It hardly illustrates the full meaning of relativity.

Perhaps where you perceive emptiness and anarchy, others perceive correctness and order.

Like religion; one mans abstraction is another mans insanity.

The 17 authors of the manifesto.

>But you would further impose problem solving constraints on others thought work.

I would, yes. I've worked with a diversity of methodologies and several times with no explicit methodology all and in a team context we ended up a disorganized mess.

It’s not to bring order to chaos. It’s to afford shelter, food, and healthcare.

Sorry, not sorry.

Perhaps you’d be happier living as a hermit, where you can organize as you wish; everything just so! without the rest of humanity, that does quite a bit of the heavy lifting for you, interfering.

"What ineffable twaddle" !

I highly recommend to you the works of David Parnas, Barry Boehm, Fred Brooks, Gerald Weinberg for edification.

Start with the paper; "A Rational Design Process: How and Why to Fake It."

(1) The Manifesto is written in non-actionable terms.

(2) Many of the same people that initially attached themselves to the manifesto were already pitching canned processes, that may have been the outcome of agile process where they originated but did not put the critical feedback mechanisms more prominently than the low-level processes. So, those became the actionable versions of “Agile”.

It would be so much better if instead of the “X over Y” language, the Manifesto has spent a few words talking about how the less important things were subordinated to the more important ones.

The weird thing is that continuous, bottom-up, empirically-based process improvement wasn't an unknown concept at the time the Manifesto was written. It wouldn't have been hard for it to reference more concrete, actionable, concepts and practices.

I don’t think that people who don't write or never wrote software should have a place in a software development team. We don’t allow scrum masters and agile coaches in hospitals and ask them to “improve the process”, because we know the only “improvement” we will get is millions of dead and injured. But for whatever reason we allow freshly minted certified scrum masters to lecture seasoned professionals on process, to organise 19 meetings a day to discuss the differences between scrum and agile and, in general, to unleash havoc and destruction.

You should collectively have just refused to work for them in this case.

They're not called scrum masters but the healthcare industry is absolutely full of them. One peculiar thing about the covid crisis was, at least around this particular corner of the planet, in the all-hands-on-deck situation where everyone on the floor in healthcare had to help out, these people suddenly found other things to do. It was impressive to see what could be accomplished when everyone was focused on a singular goal, without a coach in sight. I'm sure there's a lesson there somewhere.

Concluding: It is certainly refreshing how efficient groups can be once a crisis forces all attention towards one single goal. (Perhaps unfortuntately) that is not a reliable (crisises are usually not predictable) nor sustainable (other goals tend to get neglected in crisis mode).

Since the purpose of a hospital is not to make money but to improve health-related outcomes, this is usually bad.

On the other hand, it turns out that focus on improving health-related outcomes by applying science and statistics works really well... and usually decreases costs, too.

This is no guarantee any more. Newly minted managers coming from a development position that have only ever worked in dysfunctional organisations (and got promoted from within) will only reinforce the existing bad practices.

Give it a few years.

I think the GP meant "in hospitals" as in "among medical people", doctors and nurses, not IT staff.

Because they often don't understand the technology question or even what the issue is, but insist to intercept every decision.

It's easy to blame management because developers and engineers haven't the foggiest idea what management actually does.

Instead of engaging with that problem, they retreat to themselves where they hiss the name management in dark corners.

Fact is: Developers are incapable of self organising, and would drown overnight without management's stiff hand.

I absolutely hate how accurate that is because I always thought I was a big boy and I wouldn't need management if I just had "1 good tech idea".

Docker had the philosophy.

Now they are dying after losing the container wars. That's what happens when you have no idea what a product actually is...

>but insist to intercept every decision

Yes, because left to our own devices, developers will not contribute meaningful business value.

There is a better way, evidently it's not agile, but it needs management's buy in, because well they're in charge (get over it in all honestly, none of us actually want the job, trust me).

WE as engineers need to find a better way to engage management.

But those of you who just grumble "management ruin everything" deserve the pain that such a divide causes and we need to stop wasting lifeboat's on that mentality please

I beg to differ.

A dev team doing agile, with a team leader who is a manager/dev, can definitely self-organise. The team leader interfaces with non-dev management, removes roadblocks, and in collaboration with the rest of the devs sets the direction for a sprint.

You need this team lader role to keep the suits off your back, and to ensure the demands are achievable.

Project managers used to be people who wandered around with GANTT charts, and signed-off expenses and timesheets. Very rarely, I worked with a PM who saw their role as removing roadblocks, and shielding devs from suits. Those few PMs were a delight to work with (this was long before the appearance of Agile etc.)

> Yes, because left to our own devices, developers will not contribute meaningful business value.

I think that's rather obvious; management runs the business and sells the products. They set the business objectives, and there has to be clear communication between the devs and management, otherwise you get the "rewrite it all in X" syndrome.

That’s a view in many large corporates. However, in product focused companies and many startups every developer has to have a customer focused mind. Every single day.

We have to specialise at some point - not everybody that gets hired is going to be an ace industrial strategist. Few devs know how to qualify a sales prospect. If you have such people in management, then as a dev I don't want to do their job for them; they should set strategy and find good customers.

I guess we all have differing perspectives on this kind of thing; one's perspective is partly formed by one's experiences.

I'm not talking about startups - I never worked in one. But I've worked for quite a few companies with < 20 staff.

When I first started we would be doing 1-off feature requests "because the client would _really_ like it". Everything was justified because money and because "we cant afford to lose that customer!" in our SaaS product.

I saw our main product being neglected because we'd invest so much time in these 1 off features only 1 client would use. All we would ever do would be client features, I was going crazy. It took a lot of talking, and still to this day I have to get him to think in terms of the product instead of the individual client.

Now we make more money, have more clients, and better our product for everyone which in turn gets more clients to get more money.

Open source does self-organise, and manages to produce some products of exceptional quality. It’s just almost completely unsteerable.

In a company, you can pretend to order people around. But the truth is that what really matters is how all the personal and political goals happen to align.

The project I work on has around 100 regular contributors, but also a few small teams, either volunteer or staff, who meet regularly and make sure things move forward in a coherent and sustainable way.

If that's true in an organization, its only because either management has failed to hire developers that can self organize, or management has constructed structures and incentives which inhibit self-organization by developers. Usually, both. Often deliberately, because line managers are often more comfortable passively recieving directives from above and crafting directives for below than any other mechanism of management, since this minimizes conflicts with those in organizational power positions.

Problem is that the industry is full of untrained individuals who hustled their way ”fake it until you make it” and will use all their political and manipulatoy clout to justify their positions and fight back any attempt at effective process engineering.

It is very convenient then to shift attention to inadequacy of others.

I don't understand how your vision of things is not also contributory to a strong divide.

Heard of Linux?

Can you find one dev that has ever disagreed with this?

Get to rewrite the micro services, Kotlin, Cassandra, Kafka, mongoDb hardly documented, back into C# on top of SQL Server when the teams have left for the new jobs after haved pimped up their CV.

You need people that care about the how you do it as much about the why and the what. Everything else is going to be disfunctional rather soon.

If you care about quality and productivity, please quantify those and present your findings in terms of tradeoffs.

Both React and Vue.js are now older than jQuery was when both were released. Same for Babel and Webpack. Typescript is older than all of these. SASS/SCSS also older than Typescript. Those are the only things you see in 99% of the frontend job descriptions out there.

If anything, frontend is kinda boring, and it can be argued that some of those tools above need some disruption.

Heck, Microsoft has completely changed the way of writing native Windows apps in the last 10 years more ways than Javascript frameworks have introduced new stuff. Apple even changed the language to one that (unlike Typescript) is not backwards compatible. Complaining about the JS ecosystem evolving too fast is anachronistic, that happened more than 8 years ago.

No they haven't. You still write them in Delphi or Free Pascal / Lazarus just the same way you did ten years ago.

Oh, you meant "the way of writing native Windows apps" with Microsoft tools? Yeah, well... Heard the old joke about the guy who complains, "Doctor, doctor, it hurts when I do this!"? My answer is the same as the doctor's: Well, don't do that then.

The naïve thing to do when you’re a manager is to manage more in response to problems. When you start out with an agile process, and you manage more / manage harder, you end up with no agile process at all.

Scrum masters / agile coaches are very hit or miss. Just like managers, just like programmers. Management takes the blame because their failures have a larger blast radius.

Agile is Dead - https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=a-BOSpxYJ9M

Here’s a blog post by him: https://pragdave.me/blog/2014/03/04/time-to-kill-agile.html

If that’s not following a plan over responding to change, i don’t know what is.