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0 pointswpietri8y ago0 comments

I have done it right. It worked well for me. I've been on happy teams that produced good code: high quality, high test coverage, good for users. We did technical work that I'm still proud of. And we believe that was true because we paid careful attention to how we were working and improved it continuously, using a lot of techniques from the Agile movement.

I grant that there's no one right way. There are many, and they depend on circumstances. I certainly grant that there are an ocean of idiots selling bullshit. But you're throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

There are better and worse ways to make software. Teams can reflect on how they work and get better over time. Those teams can recognize patterns, and other teams can benefit from learning about those patterns and trying them out in their environment. And that's how things like Extreme Programming came to be: teams experimenting and sharing what they'd learned with other people who wanted to get better. That was exactly what the early Agile movement was.

Piss all over that if you like. But you'll be missing out.

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lj38y ago· 3 in thread

I've been on teams that have agile it right. Some have failed and some succeeded. I've been on teams that practiced chaos driven development. Some of those succeeded and some of those failed.

Did you drink any kool-aid on the way in?

wpietriOP8y ago

Your theory is that software is totally random? There's no correlation between what people do and how the project goes?

That is a really weird theory for a programmer to have about anything, let alone what he's chosen to spent 80,000 hours doing.

lj38y ago

My opinion (not "theory") is that teams are not interchangeable. Companies are not interchangeable. Industries are not interchangeable. What works for one team may not work for another. What works for a 10 man startup is not going to work for a 200,000 person company. What works for a web app company is not going to work for a video game company. But, Agile and Scrum have been shoehorned into every tech company I can see no matter how inappropriate it may be for that particular team, company or industry.

Your question prompted me to consider a thought experiment. Let's assume that management techniques are completely ineffective and the deciding factor in whether a project ships and is successful or not lies entirely with the programmers and designers. Now, let's take it one step further and say that most management techniques actually reduce the likelihood a product ships and is successful. Do you think that would stop management from trying to exert control over something that is completely out of their control? Do you think that would stop management from thinking that their input is actually making things better when in fact their input is making things worse? Managers are ultimately responsible for producing results, but they have no direct control over those results. Most humans, when put in that situation, will try to do something, anything, to make it feel like they have some control over the situation. Even if it makes that situation worse. Finally,what if what I have described above isn't actually a thought exercise, but a fairly good description of what is happening in the real world right now. Would we be able to tell?

Food for thought.

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Tomis028y ago

> That is a really weird theory

Not so weird at all. Codebase and process don't matter to a customer, all they see and judge is the end product. Sometimes even the end product doesn't matter, as the likes of Google can put much more money into ads and marketing than you.

There might be a correlation between what people do and how the project goes if you're NASA or BMW. But for 99% of the software world, nobody cares if you have the most hacky codebase ever as long as it does what it's supposed to do and doesn't have too many bugs.

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