Which firms are those, in your opinion?
I spent a few years inside Big Blue. It moves very slowly but (IMHO) has world class people putting out well written, quality stuff.
It has its dark corners like anywhere else, I'm willing to concede it may just have been the teams I worked with that were awesome, it's certainly not cool, I wouldn't want to spend my whole career working for them and (frankly) god help you if you let one of their salesman in the building... But I learned a lot about doing things right. And now I'm a freelancer without the massive organisational overhead so I get to do things fast and right.
I dunno, maybe a large traditional corp isn't the only answer, but some way of enforcing good practice on people for a while, like a boot camp, so that they can take some of it with them to environments where it's not enforced as rigidly.
Re:Agile Is Dead (Long Live Agility)
by genericresponse on Tuesday March 11, 2014 @04:05PM
(#7381773)
I think a lot of the federal contractors still have the legacy SDLC focus. Projects are huge with low margins and long timeframes. It's all about quality to keep the customer happy and not choosing the other guys.
I think that's the point. Agile/Scrum is often just window dressing. If you have a good team then it will give you some nice things like frequent interim releases and a better idea of progress. But if you don't have staff who are interested, disciplined (and talented!) then you're screwed either way. And I've met a lot of staff who are not like this.
Frankly I'd rather that people had a mandatory five-year term in a disciplined team at one of the traditional, enterprise-class, quality focussed firms that demand good practice. I can work in whatever methodology you want, but that made me the software engineer I am today.