> During planning, everyone understood that the estimates were _estimates_. Tasks could take longer or shorter, that was OK and even expected. The goal was to improve velocity, not to accomplish every story, every time.
> Engineers felt comfortable taking stories in areas they knew nothing about. A stated goal was that every engineer understand every piece of the project.
> Standups were team only. Engineers felt comfortable saying they got stuck or needed help or got lost in a rathole and didn't make the progress they hoped.
> Demos were important so that the team and the clients could understand what had changed and what new features were available.
But it quickly got lost - managers and PMs and Directors got involved and Jira boards became published for all to see. (In the beginning it was whiteboards and sticky note). Standups and Demos were all about self-promotion. No one ever wanted to take on a task they weren't 100% certain they could do. If a task was 3 point it needed to be done in 3 days or there would be questions.
When I left the last company it had gotten outrageous. Every task should be completed in three days and in production in five days - and if not that team was Doing Something Wrong.
( We were told that this was standard FAANG practice, I have no idea how true that was )
What happened was what you'd expect - shortcuts, tech debt, unit tests cynically design to pass and meet code coverage expectations instead of actually usefully testing.
The reality is that any process is going to fail one senior leadership decides it's a way to evaluate engineers, not create a good product.
I've come to believe that that main driver for Agile adoption has come to be something similar. Making visible to outsiders what software development teams are doing, and making progress (or it's lack) visible to management. I thinks that's a completely reasonable expectation. Businesses are paying exorbitant salaries and providing ping pong tables, why shouldn't they have visibility into what's being done?
Where it becomes toxic is in areas this posts parent indicates; posturing, one upsmanship, pressure to perform. Effective teams need "safe spaces" to learn, discover, try and fail. Agile isn't that anymore. Hasn't been for a long time.
And as you say, managerial involvement is the problem. Managers and execs mostly get paid to appear to be in control, so having the appearance of control is vital to them, even if that makes the results wildly worse.
The primary point of Agile is to empower developers. If management is determined to micromanage them anyway, then Agile is pointless. If the term Agile is to have any business value at all, then let it be the stick with which developers beat some sense into stupid managers. Points are indeed rough estimates and can easily be off by a large factor, and they're definitely not meant to measure performance. Standups are about the team and about helping each other move forward. Demos are about getting feedback from stakeholders. It's fine if others see the Jira board, but it's not theirs. It's the developers'. And if a task isn't done, and it isn't done.
I fight for this if necessary, but fortunately I'm currently working in a team of very vocal and opinionated developers who take charge of their project and push back against managers if necessary. We do Scrum, but we're not dogmatic about it. We change the sprint scope if the situation calls for it. And we rebel when it's management that's calling for it.
It's certainly reasonable for those various stakeholders to ask for visibility. Demos are great for that, and a lead engineer or front-line engineering manager can work with stakeholders to establish some metrics to report on, but those are epiphenomenal to the process chosen.
I'm not saying it's a guarantee, just that nothing else really works well.
and it was understood and expected that this meant the estimate would go up
Today we have 'bidding', which if that sounds like something a three year old does to their parents, you'd be right, and it's the same thing. You just ask someone else until you get the answer you want to hear (instead of the one you need to hear).
We should make "estimate" a banned word and replace it with a word like "guess".
Too often what starts out with an off-the-cuff chat about implementing some feature while people are getting coffee with a statement like "Oh I don't think it will be too hard to do this - will take a week tops <filddles with coffee machine />" etc ends up growing its own legs and becomming a gold-plated and irreversible commitment made to a director/VP/CxO somehow. What was a casual guess made without all the information required is now a rod for.our own back. Again.
Perhaps as engineers we should give ourselves a sort of mental style-guide to never ever say the words hours/days/weeks/months/quarters/etc without alarm bells going off in our head and requiring extensive peer review in the same way we do when we're writing "dangerous" code (e.g. user-provided values going in to SQL queries etc) Only half joking really :)
I'm getting really tired of companies trotting out the "because [Facebook|Apple|Google] does it" excuse. Those are massive companies. Are we so delusional to believe that what works for a $70B/year company will automatically work for our $20MM/year company?
One difference between those highly paid software companies and others, is the expectation of performance. Netflix famously considers their team a sports team rather than a typical corporation. It's totally common for a great engineer to bomb out of those companies, just like how great athletes get kicked off top tier sports teams when they failed to perform due to reasons out of their control.
While most other companies, lacking the ability or willingness to pay top dollars, are probably better off creating a safe environment for engineers who can be on-par or even better than FAANG engineers, but lack the political maturity to survive those high pressure environment.
They saw a process that did an end run around them in favour of more self-management, and it worked well and got a lot of hype, that's terrible for their careers obviously.
So they fixed it and kept the same name for marketing.
Gonna play devils advocate here...would those two be mutually exclusive?
I feel there's a fundamental flaw in the garden of agile eden you initially described and that's trust...if you don't have it or lose it then gl trying to convince someone to essentially write a blank cheque for something they don't understand
If trust can erode a whole methodology then it's something to consider imo
As a customer, you get to decide what you want to buy, and you get to be happy or unhappy with the delivered product.
But you don't get to control or even monitor the work in the factory/kitchen/etc.
That's instead the job of a boss! Of course, an agile team also has a boss. But it's not the customer.
Estimates are an interesting one. The theory of story point estimation is that you are estimating the size of the work being and not even implying, let along guaranteeing any notion of timing. That being said, it's still sometimes a valid question to ask why something is taking so long.
A great talk that I make everyone watch is John Cleese on Creativity In Management, it is a must watch for value extractors dealing with value creation that ultimately is creative work [1][2].
The open mode is allowing space, time and confidence. Closed mode is finishing/ship it mode.
"CLOSED" MODE
> By the "closed mode" I mean the mode that we are in most of the time when {we are} at work.
> We have inside us a feeling that there's lots to be done and we have to get on with it if we're going to get through it all.
> It's an active (probably slightly anxious) mode, although the anxiety can be exciting and pleasurable.
> It's a mode which we're probably a little impatient, if only with ourselves.
> It has a little tension in it, not much humor.
> It's a mode in which we're very purposeful, and it's a mode in which we can get very stressed and even a bit manic, but not creative.
"OPEN" MODE
> The open mode, is relaxed… expansive… less purposeful mode… in which we're probably more contemplative, more inclined to humor (which always accompanies a wider perspective) and, consequently, more playful.
> It's a mood in which curiosity for its own sake can operate because we're not under pressure to get a specific thing done quickly. We can play, and that is what allows our natural creativity to surface.
...
> Humor is a natural concomitant in the open mode, but it's a luxury in the closed {mode}.
COMBINING OPEN and CLOSED MODE
> Once we've taken a decision we should narrow our focus while we're implementing it, and then after it's been carried out we should once again switch back to the open mode to review the feedback rising from our action, in order to decide whether the course that we have taken is successful, or whether we should continue with the next stage of our plan. Whether we should create an alternative plan to correct any error we perceive.
> And then back into the closed mode to implement that next stage, and so on.
EXAMPLE
> ...one of Alfred Hitchcock's regular co-writers has described working with him on screenplays.
> He says, "When we came up against a block and our discussions became very heated and intense, Hitchcock would suddenly stop and tell a story that had nothing to do with the work at hand. At first, I was almost outraged, and then I discovered that he did this intentionally. He mistrusted working under pressure. He would say "We're pressing, we're pressing, we're working too hard. Relax, it will come." And, says the writer, of course it finally always did. We need both modes.
The world is value creators (product/engineer/creative/imagination) and value extractors (business/management/finance). Once the latter group get control, they end up squashing the "open" mode that is so key to making good products. The value extractors increase pressure but sometimes lowering pressure will let the product iterations flow to a better product end result.
Value must be created first before value can be extracted, but you can't force value creation with only the "closed" mode.
Value creation processes that make sure there is an "open" mode along with the "closed" mode are always more successful, and sometimes the "open" mode doesn't look like work so the value extractors cut it first unknowingly killing the product slowly.
The wrong type of Agile removes the "open" mode and cuts prototyping, iterations and refinement of creative value creation. A more open type of iterative development is always better.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pb5oIIPO62g
[2] https://genius.com/John-cleese-lecture-on-creativity-annotat...
It's well known that the systems an organization produces are bound to reflect the communications structures within that organization this is known as Conway's principle
In order to maintain flexibility in the design it's necessary to maintain flexibility in communication but engineers have no incentive to push for free communication and stick together to see the job done right, each of them is attached to a management minder who reports to a rigid top-down governance structure with very different ideas on how software should be done, effectively stifling any potential dissent at the source and acting like an authoritarian regime with the desire to divorce the workers from ownership of their work and turn them into compliant and productive cogs in the machine
The reason for this is not because corporacy sucks but because humans suck at corporacy and when placed in group environments of over a handful of people we tend to resort to mob rule and groupthink at the expense of culture and individual rights
It's rather complex but incentives are the clearest indicator of outcomes people simply have no incentives to help each other but every incentive to seek permission and recognition from management
In such an environment it's been postulated that four types of personalities emerge as people attempt to exert control and these are known as Control Dramas:
- The Intimidator
- The Interrogator
- The Aloof and
- The Poor Me
You can look these up there are several good articles online about identifying and mitigating these but it's not always just one but a combination that people exhibit
Framed in this context you can see corporations as implemented naively operate on only four cylinders even if it's only figuratively or intuitively true it's far from the humane ideal of what agile intended and this also has to do with metrics becoming targets and incentives trumping ethics
In the end we trumpet DRY and try to 'focus on our work' while we repeat the same inane insane dramas day after day expecting a different outcome that's the worst form of repeating yourself but we collectively walk into it in every case
I'm personally carrying a lot of resentment at the engineer class because we've been trained to know better but we simply can't get over ourselves and wake up to the fact that we're not just part of the problem, we are the problem but as such we also possess the solution if we really sit down and think about it
The solution lies in the following concepts
A) it's possible to have alignment and autonomy it's not necessary to choose between chaos and blind compliance
B) It's possible to have investment and productivity but it's necessary to trust people and that ultimately is where we fail
I understand why it would be super cool if software worked like that, but I have to iterate on features holistically and sometimes speculatively.
At least for me, software development has never been able to be so cleanly broken down into "first, implement the button" type tasks.
But maybe I'm just dumb.
What I do with my guys is I make them decompose the feature, but with the understanding that they'll probably be jumping from one subtask to the other, back and forth, as they understand what it is they'll be building. AND they'll probably come across new subtasks as they work through the feature.
It makes Jira look crappy, but it Reflects Reality (tm) which to me is far more important than keeping Jira clean.
Nobody can; that's the primary failure mode of waterfall. Anybody who is telling you to decompose a feature into that many subtasks might claim to be doing agile but they really are trying to do waterfall.
But as an example of early Agile intent, here is how we worked in 2004: http://williampietri.com/writing/2004/teamroom/
You'll note that we never did detailed planning more than a week in advance. We could have, but it would have been a waste, because it would have been speculation on speculation. Instead we'd agree on something small to build, get it working, and then see what we thought.
No, nothing is wrong with you. But let me note that the Agile Manifesto doesn't say anything about Jira, or anything prescriptive about how small to make your stories.
If your methodology asks you to do that, I'd argue that your methodology is broken. But it's broken because it's shit, not because it's "agile."
No, not at all.
Decomposing a new feature into digestible pieces is hard work and a skill that is learned over time. It's also a skill to know when something is small-enough, or has enough unknowns that further decomposition is wasteful.
Good product owners and managers know this and are good at it themselves. And the decomposition is typically at a story level - "can we take story X, break it into 2 smaller stories, and still deliver something of value?" The tasks are usually pretty self-evident once you break down the stories a few times.
For a lot of my work, if the story is "As a user, I need to do X" the tasks are simply broken into distinctly testable pieces.* Is there a database change? That's a task. Is there an API change? That's another task. Front-end change? Third task. And if you get half-way through and need to start over, that's life and it happens reasonably often. Yeah, there might be some re-testing. Or, a new story for next sprint.
It's up to me, as the manager, to make sure the stakeholders are informed and on-board. At the end of the day, as long as the team is making progress, I'm happy. And if the team isn't making progress, it's probably my fault (and almost never the fault of an individual contributor).
* In my world, tasks don't exist in isolation. They're all subordinate to a user story. Every task (piece of work) we do is done in the furtherance of a well-defined need of the user. And developers are never defining tasks on their own - it's done as a team.
It wouldn't be a complete decomposition, of course, a person watching would see your thinking unfold. I think speculative decomposition would be very interesting, especially in retrospective if we could see the rabbit holes we went down.
Decomposing is easy since we naturally have to do that as we work. Heck, those 500 tasks are probably in your shell, browser and commit histories, mixed in with a bunch of other junk.
The problem is tools like Jira make this heavy-weight, doing it up front makes it nigh impossible, and having others review all this stuff and it becoming promises blows up the LOE significantly. And, I don't think I'd want to be under that much of a microscope as I work.
But if it were very lightweight, where I'm just posting my thoughts and can see them as a quick dependency diagram, and maybe attach notes, commits and URLs to them, and other people can see them, that'd be pretty helpful.
Forget the developer for a moment and take the user perspective. What's the first thing the user wants to do? Log in? Ok, that's a story. What's the next thing the user wants to do? See a list of widget prices? Ok, that's a story. What's the next thing the user wants to do? Change a price? Story.
If you can't sit down and think of a dozen narratives like this, then the fundamental problem that you don't really understand how people are supposed to use your software or what your software is supposed to do.
YES. THANK YOU! I've been trying to tell people this for ages. Maybe other people are somehow capable of perfectly predicting every conceivable edge-case and consequence without even starting to work on something, but I can't. I have to start building something in order to see it clearly. And this ENRAGES certain kinds of managers, I have found.
https://blog.codinghorror.com/tending-your-software-garden/
The reality is that your ability to break things down depends on experience. I’ve built so many landing pages, for example, that I can tell you an exact breakdown of tasks. Been a part of so many SaaSes, I can tell you exactly what non-core features you’ll need, when, and how much work they are. I can also predict where you’ll hiccup.
But ask me to build something new that’s never been done before (at least by me) and the most I can do is shrug and guess. Maybe give you a rough sketch of an outline of subtasks.
Here is why it is important:
a) Risk management - if you break a feature down into sub-tasks at any granularity, you are creating an agreement (or at least a conversation) among your peers that this is how something will be implemented, and digging in beforehand to uncover areas which might impede shipping the feature sooner.
b) You're going to have to break down the feature at some point. Being able to think through this ahead of time can be challenging, but often times is the meat of the work you do. You have to get into the hang of it -- think top-down or bottom-up ways of approaching it.
But what if you don't have enough information or understanding yet to do that? Agile is not great for these tasks where you need to take some time learning or experimenting.
I would offer you a couple extra tools here:
- A "spike" ticket -- Agile is all about deliverables and commitments, but sometimes that doesn't work. So create a spike ticket, and define what it is you want to investigate. If you deliver something, great! If not, no worries. The important part is that in the future you've done work that enabled you to learn how to estimate or break down that task in the future.
- A time-boxed ticket -- similar to the spike, but you just make sure you don't spend more than an allotted time on a task.
Company and developers are busy and successful, so they hire more, which continues until they are no longer successful.
They remain busy, however, progress on the product is roughly constant. All the additional work capacity is spent on meetings and otherwise organizing the increased worker count.
I believe the above describes every situation in which I have been asked to break down Jira tasks into unnaturally small tasks.
To be able to decompose a feature, you need to learn how to build the software in your head before you go to paper. Consider a large billing page, for example.
Step 1 is to look at the front end. What components do I need to build? (React might use components, or a set of partials and templates in rails, for example.) So, then, I know I need X subtasks, where I will build the pieces I need to expose that behavior to the client to start.
I then look down into the backend. That might be a simple task on the backend, or given 20 minutes of looking, I might see problems that I'll need to tackle. The problems are their own subtasks. I may be able to group some of the front end to a single back end ticket, or I might need a separate subtask for each.
Now, I'm likely to miss something. However, that's why this is an estimate rather than a concrete task list. It's to get started so that we know, at minimum, what it's going to take.
It's not necessarily simple, but it is a skill that can be developed.
Maybe it was just my particular job, but so much of my work was figuring out how to do xyz, so it was hard to give estimates for something whilst I was still figuring out the scope and complexity of along with how it even works and I was rarely, if ever doing the same/similar thing multiple times. Whenever project managers did push for me to break things down further they’d then immediately complain about too much technical detail.
Which is to say: To all the people jeering for Agile's demise, please provide a superior alternative. I came from a world dominated by Waterfall, and I never want to go back to that. A lot of companies get Agile wrong, and it isn't a panacea, but it is much closer to what developers are naturally inclined towards (e.g. rapid incremental improvements) than Waterfall ever was.
So I challenge anyone who wants to replace Agile, please lean into how developers work rather than trying to mold their work onto your rigid front loaded methodology. Trying to bring in ideas of other industries, like engineering or architecture, that build physical goods and only have one shot at is a folly.
One of the reasons Agile (with a big A) is so successful is that its peddlers have convinced everyone that there are only two options: Agile and waterfall. When you're up against a strawman, it's easy to win. But it's absolutely a false dichotomy.
There's a quote in the article that I like:
> Find me an actual tech company that talks much about Agile, and I will be astounded.
In my experience, people at tech companies (at least the FAANGs) rarely talk about Agile, although they do talk about things like continuous integration/testing/deployment. They do not obsess over methodologies for how to move post-it notes around a whiteboard (Scrum vs Kanban) or agonize over how to word a user story narrative, or other parts of Agile Theatre.
People at some non-tech companies, especially those supposedly going through a "digital transformation", seem to have fully bought in to the crap that Certified Agile consultants are selling though.
So a superior alternative to both Agile and waterfall is what's in use at a lot of the big tech companies. For example, the engineering culture at Google, which relies on design docs and a very good set of developer tools and infrastructure. It's not perfect, but it's far, far superior to Agile.
And before anyone makes the argument that those non-tech companies are not doing "real Agile", but Google is, let's be linguistic descriptivists and accept that Googlers don't call their methodology "Agile", whereas the Scrum consultants at big corporates do.
It was utterly frustrating to be powerless to improve specification quality and find out you built exactly what was asked but you were asked for the wrong thing.
The silos were horrible. Devs were often as bad as BAs, dev’s just were just crapping on the testers instead. Spare a thought for the production ops person at the very end of the chain. Here comes 3 months of developer work in one weekend and no it doesnt work but we’re still going live because the entire tech org is invested in this release. Now you have smaller squads, you can postpone a release without it looking bad on the top person and thus affecting your career prospects.
In agile models you have the power to fix crap processes that don’t work. You can call out any BS on the retrospective and make it super visible when things are being swept under the rug.
The goal of Agile is to let smart people work incrementally towards a somewhat nebulous goal. The ceremony that's arisen around that tends to be put in place by people who feel the need to manage, but don't know how to help their developers achieve that goal.
The alternative, as far as I've seen, is to hire smart, curious people, let them work closely with the end user, and pay them a lot of money. In this situation, the engineers will typically self-organize effectively.
Give individuals ownership over different parts and then let them self organize, that is all you need if you hire competent people. I'll never work at a place which doesn't work like that again.
You don't need to buy entirely into a single methodology. When people say Agile in software today, they really mean the Jira-flavored Scrum. Some now claim that they've abandoned Scrum and you hear more about Kanban. Sometimes they really are switching, other time they're really just doing Scrum with a Kanban board. But again, they're often falling into the same traps of forcing solutions, rituals, and processes they might not really need into their flow.
You want to be Agile? Start small. A simple checklist is a good way to start.
I think part of the issue is that Agile is meant to be a Process imposed from top down to improve productivity by X%, a way for management and a small army of backlog/task managers to say they are doing Something and having impact (or literally the only thing they actively do). Not only can it easily get in the way of that, it almost always fosters an environment of shaming and lack of trust, because it is too tempting for estimates to be taken too seriously or productivity/performance measured "objectively" by invoking the task-tracking system (in which case you incentivize only taking on very easy, very well understood tasks). It doesn't always devolve to that, but I think at many places if anybody Important up in the management chain starts thinking that way, it will inevitably trickle down. Thus any sufficiently large organization will corrupt Agile.
Perhaps some companies need that level of accountability and visibility, even knowing and disliking the drawbacks, but not all of them. I am honestly not convinced that a rigid process is necessary at all. Yes it makes sense to have a system where you keep track of things that need to be done, but if there's a culture of trust, I don't think the system needs to be gamified or fetishized as much as it usually is.
> Now, continuous delivery is what’s expected, and the industry is ready for the next thing. But that next thing shouldn’t be another methodology, according to Mary.
> There is no methodology in my field of software engineering that can conceivably last more than five to eight years,” she said. “Everything that is 10 years old is obsolete. Everything that is 20 years old is archaic.”
> Furthermore, she said, methodology requires codification. Beginning with the Capability Maturity Model (CMM) in the ‘90s, software development methodology meant developers had to show they had standards and that they followed them, rather than demonstrating that their standards were constantly in flux depending on consumer needs. That’s the definition of quality standards lean manufacturing practitioners in Japan originally espoused, Mary said, and they’re not compatible with methodology. Instead, they’re all about learning.
> To that end, Mary is excited about all the ways artificial intelligence will allow software engineers to learn better and faster. Automated testing, continuous deployment and cross-functional collaboration are now table stakes, Mary and Tom agreed. Cutting edge companies will discover the next great approach through an engineering mindset and a willingness to learn.
___
Consider that Mary and Tom Poppendieck were responsible for many of the Lean inclusions of the agile movement, which (largely) came from watching plant manufacturing at Toyota. Similarly, much of the DevOps movement was tied to this as well. If you want to talk about what is next, it is likely taking a first principles look at what we're doing today, questioning best practices again, and saying, "if we were going to make a manifesto in 2020, what would it look like?"
I suspect that most knowledgeable developers rolled their eyes when Agile was "invented". It's a mish mash of a lot of things that were already obvious at the time and some weird kool-aid like pair programming. And just one more in a long line of consultant enrichment schemes.
"Individuals and interactions over processes and tools"
Agile would work much better if every implementation stated upfront, "Does not work right out of the box".
When you throw in the incentives of compensation and career advancement, politics and human nature are bound to corrupt the process further.
This is why codified process will always be better in the long run for most companies, because it's the only tool possible for combatting this
I think that’s what’s missing in most companies. We have 360 reviews, retrospectives and all kinds of stuff but there is no feedback channel up the chain. At my company whenever there are obvious problems management secludes itself and then a solution will be revealed to the underlings who never got heard. Especially in tech it’s pretty safe to assume that engineers at the bottom of the pyramid are as intelligent and educated as people further up the chain so I think their input is valuable.
Well, who would have thought :)
A key success of agile was to provide a buzzword that let engineers say no when they were asked for a fixed estimate for a fixed-until-it-changes scope to fit in a Gantt chart.
Take agile away and they'll be straight back to demanding to know how long it's going to take to build something when no one's really sure what the something is.
It can still be evaluated on the merits but IMO this greatly pollutes the speed at which software devs as a broadly conceived community can come to consensus understanding of this.
Also I think the comparison to lean manufacturing has always been very shallow. I get the metaphor, I just don't think that human resources in engineering can be optimized like manufacturing processes. This quote is the best part of the article:
> "You’d never hear anyone say, 'We help mechanical engineers be agile. That would be silly. And I mean that in the worst possible sense of the word".
As for the rest of it, I'm not dying to hear what the person who invented Agile thinks we should do next lol.
Absolutely. And, having done some agile consulting long ago, I'd say it's more pernicious than that.
The people who truly want to make deep change in pursuit of deep improvement are a small segment of the market. Worse, they don't need a lot of help. In the aughts, I had a few clients who really got it after 3 months of focused work, and then they were off and running.
But a large company that only wants to talk about change and maybe make some 5% improvements if they aren't too hard? That can be milked forever. Well, I can't, because I care about results. But consultants who either don't care or don't notice? They're golden.
And I think this failure of the Agile movement has been obvious for a decade. I gave up on Agile conferences circa 2009, and wrote a long piece about this in 2011: http://agilefocus.com/2011/02/21/agiles-second-chasm-and-how...
Agile has plenty of good ideas.
The problem is the almost religious following and, as you mention, the whole industry that has sprung up around it.
Even the initiators said that it was supposed to be a rough framework, to be adapted to your individual circumstances and teams. It was also a (much needed) counterpoint to the then prevalent waterfall model.
Now we have consultants, people strictly following something they read in a book or learned in a course, adhering to strict structure of meetings/processes, and even a big association with a single software product, Jira. ("You are doing it wrong!")
When you step back, a lot of the ideas make sense, and many teams will even implement similar workflows without having ever heard about "Agile".
Common sense has to prevail though.
I have literally heard this pitch.
> > "You’d never hear anyone say, 'We help mechanical engineers be agile. That would be silly. And I mean that in the worst possible sense of the word".
This quote is silly.
To me, agile is just good engineering practice, applied to software. Of course mechanical engineers apply its principles, and have for decades before the term Agile was coined.
And as such, this practice is far older than software.
The Apollo space programme is my favourite example: the ultimate goal remained fixed (man/moon/before end of decade), but all steps of the way were discovered and redefined over the programme's course.
Mission objectives were changed depending on what was learned, often even in flight.
This was a very nice and agile (and sensible) approach, regardless of what it was called.
Which bothers me much, much less than selling things like CMMI/PSP certifications or EUP/RUP which are done purely for paper pushing and selling the paper value.
Agile is an improvement on waterfall and you don't need to be certified to do it.
Agile and Lean are empirical process controls, they are based on the same concepts. Ken Schwaber explains all this on the first chapter of his book "Agile Software Development with SCRUM":
Defined process control: same inputs always result in same output (manufacturing widgets on a production line).
Empirical process control: same inputs not always result in same output.
Schwaber conceived SCRUM (and was among the founders of Agile) after realizing software development required an empirical process control: give 2 dev teams same specs, 2 different apps will come out (they might do the same thing, but in different ways)
“Way too much of Agile has been not about technology, but about people and about managing things and about getting stuff done — not necessarily getting the right stuff done.”
This is the whole point of agile: progress on iterations, inspect and adapt at the end of each iteration.
Your team might build the "wrong stuff" for an iteration, realize it (inspect), then make a course correction (adapt). If you end up delivering the "wrong stuff" is because you didn't follow this very core principle of agile.
I find it hard to believe these so called "Agile Early Evangelists" can make such a statement. Their background in lean development should have made the familiar with empirical process controls, from where lean and agile come from.
My guess the author quoted them selectively to fit the "agile sucks" narrative of the article.
Edit: expanded last 2 paragraphs.
I have been privileged to work in a company that really thought about and worked to prioritize the four values on the left. I would follow those agile coaches to any place they wanted. I have been a staunch defender in real life and online, because I've seen it work very well. I also have been on teams with other processes and seen how much worse it can be.
I will take the values of agile and push for those, and I'll take the lessons learned such as quick feedback loops, continuous integration, relative estimation, automated tests (which came from people like Kent Beck and Robert Martin pushing them so hard alongside agile), and the good stuff.
However, after seeing how badly it can be weaponized against developers, I'm certainly ready to throw out the bathwater, and I think this is what they're talking about. I've seen far too much cargo cult agile and far too much command and control with a light layer of SCRUM.
We have agile "coaches" who have never learned to code! They take a set of color-by-number technical practices but don't understand how or why they matter! I had to correct someone's slide that got the four values wrong, and their consulting group apparently had been copying and pasting them incorrectly from presentation to presentation!
The values and principles of agile are great. The current implementation has some serious debt.
(And while we're at it, we could update it. Too many people misunderstood the documentation part. Continuous attention to technical excellence needs to be upgraded to a value. Delivering frequently today means days instead of weeks.)
Which sounds a bit like the "no true scotsman" fallacy.
If so many people have trouble implementing agile maybe it just doesn't work?
Agile was a neat idea 20 years ago and it changed the engineering practices. However, unlike the methodology, engineering practices continued to change and modern software development practices automate away a lot of what agile processes tried to orchestrate.
If you are doing continuous delivery and lean development, you should be conceiving of and shipping software features in time units smaller than a sprint (i.e. continuously). That was very rare 2 decades ago and has become the norm for a lot of tech companies. It requires asynchronous processes and practices. It's enabled by having automated builds, automated tests, and automated deployments. These tools barely existed 2 decades ago and have had a far larger impact on software development then any form of agile.
Lots of large OSS projects and software companies have made the shift from doing feature based software delivery to time based software delivery. E.g. MS famously kept missing its own deadlines with windows vista, windows 7, etc. and shifted to having a more predictable release schedule. Ubuntu's LTS releases appear regular as clockwork in April of every second year. Linux ships a kernel every 2-3 months. Mozilla ships Firefox every month.
Time based releases are basically about releasing an unknown quantity of software at specific intervals and with a high level of quality. It involves having multiple asynchronous tracks of development and instead of planning which of them need to be ready they simply use quality gates to determine which of them are actually ready to ship. It's a shift from what to when and it emphasizes quality (i.e. good engineering) over schedule.
Most agile methodologies are still stuck trying to do feature based planning. It's the project mentality from the nineties where things get commissioned and have to be delivered on a particular schedule. Worse, these things are often under specified and then blow right by their planned deadlines. Just like in the nineties. I've seen a lot of agile projects shipping low quality software doing the wrong things right on time.
Keep in mind though problems also show up with waterfall or young small startups. Its just which flavor of friction/pain project issue you are willing to deal with
SAFe is everything that has ever been wrong with the software industry rolled into one terrible thing that is anything but agile.
I can't fully express here quite what I think of it!
Tech guys like to do the same. One director once showed the "architecture" of the next big thing in our department. It was a bunch off boxes with "authentication", "JSON", "distributed", "NOSQL", "JSON", "Roles", "reliability" and twenty other buzzwords. He asked for estimates how long it would take. after asking what this means and what it's supposed to do I was out of the planning. Two years later there are still two guys developing it but nobody knows what it does.
The other issue that agile conferences don't have developers anymore.
Big 'A' - "Agile" is waterfall re-branded - an excuse for corporate empire building and business as usual. It involves lot's of meetings and not trusting those who build software to do the right thing.
Small 'a' - "agile" is the implementation of the manifesto, which basically comes down to smart people figuring out how to work together towards a goal, often by taking small steps.
Until the terminology is sorted out the discussion can't help but be confused.
We can talk all day about principle philosophical differences and what is/isn't 'agile,' but there has been a consensus from businesses in industry that 'agile' is 'Agile.'
Agile has become an excuse for terrible planning and offloading more and more work with ever increasing responsibilities to developers. At some point, enough professionals will reject following these terrible frameworks through different mechanisms. We're definitely not there yet, unfortunately.
Hiring a consultant to teach 'Agile' is easy: the change of practices from something completely top-down to something that empowers the people at the bottom is the hard part and some orgs aren't capable of changing. Too many orgs are built around micromanagement, they don't know any other way.
Once it got popular, "Agile" was co-opted by all the usual players (cf "extreme" before it, to a lesser degree).
The important idea is "agile" vs. waterfall, whether or not that includes anything directly recognizable as "Agile". Or call it something else, doesn't really matter.
Recent history shows you can certainly do things directly recognizable as part of the Agile methodology while demonstrably not being agile, so modulo the no true scotsman fallacy it's a much less fruitful distinction to draw.
I thing “good, fast, cheap; pick 2” is still generally valid.
So I always felt that fast and cheap go hand in hand.
I think the triangle is:
- features
- quality
- cost (=both price & time)
Edit: I forgot to mention that you cannot just throw more engineers at a problem to make it go faster. There is such a thing as an optimal team size.
Another edit (sorry it's Friday evening here;)): The faster you can get it done, the cheaper it will be.
When you finally liberate a team from Agile, it's just breathtaking how much you can focus on delivering working software that gets deployed with quick iterations that's closely aligned with the business and customer's needs. When free from the tyranny of Agile, teams can be effectively self-organize, remove micro-managers, and quickly adapt to changing needs and requirements. My experience is that staff are usually much happier, more productive, and less stressed once agile is gone.
I mean contemporary Agile as pushed by corporations and those awful "coaches" (who never seem to be actual developers) --- if you were you design a system whose end goal was making great developers unhappy, unproductive and locked into a dysfunctional system, Agile would be it.
That's literally the agile manifesto.
"Scrum" is one implementation of what agile was trying to achieve. Maybe that's what you're thinking of?
For example, there are days towards the end of the sprint when I’m not allowed to pick up new work and the infinite wisdom of the agile coach is that a ‘clean’ board by the end of the sprint is the what we’re really being paid to deliver (and starting something else would compromise that). This runs alongside serious customer deadlines which are hidden by the dates the Agile program runs by.
He subsequently gave a talk comparing agile (and open source and consulting and startups and...) to fascist propaganda. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c5Xh2Go-jkM
I'm not promoting it or saying I agree with it (I actually disagree with quite a bit of it), but it is entertaining.
As far as I'm concerned, "agile" refers to the principles on this page[1], and ONLY the principles on this page. Not Scrum, not Lean, not Kanban, not Xtreme.
The problem is, it's hard to sell a set of principles. To understand people and interactions takes months of working with people: it's much easier to sell them a process or a tool and leave. Customer collaboration requires building a relationship: it's much easier to negotiate a contract for your client and leave. Responding to change requires you to stick around and see what changes happen: it's much easier to sell them a plan and leave. And to arrive at working software you have to get a lot of things right: it's much easier to sell a bunch of documentation for software that doesn't exist, and then leave. Money ruins everything: the reason agile had to explicitly deprioritize the things on the right side of the list in the first place is that all the incentives in a software company push you toward the wrong priorities. The things on the right side of the list are all quick, easy wins that look good on a quarterly report.
There are companies who I've worked with who do agile (the principles) well. There's nothing wrong with looking at Scrum/Kanban/whatever as inspiration, as long as you realize that they're just processes: individuals and interactions matter more. There's nothing wrong with using Pivotal/Jira/Trello/whatever, as long as you realize they're just tools: individuals and interactions matter more.
I said that it would take me 5 minutes to go into Jira and close out all the existing issues if that is what they are worried about?
The only long term solution for us was to have days dedicated to Agile ceremonies and days where no team member can be interrupted based on an agile ceremony need (there were few exceptions, like critical bug discovery, etc.). In weekly sprints, we had at least 3.5 days of uninterrupted time and in two-week sprints we had 7-7.5.
That changed a lot the pace of those sprints as people had a lot of time to do their job and everyone was happy.
Sometimes we move things in and out of a sprint mid-sprint because new information came up and it's high priority? It's not ideal (and we'll discuss it in retro) but that's agile.
We've sat a fat 5-point ticket in our backlog for 3 sprints straight because it needs a decent sum of meeting time and dedicated attention from multiple engineers who keep facing higher priority work and not quite having time for it? That's fine, we're being agile.
Our backlog grooming meeting ended after 8 minutes because we had nothing to discuss and we're all focused on delivering? Very agile.
That being said. I think there is a lot of wisdom in the original agile manifesto. The core principles are solid, but the methodology has clearly been co-opted by consultants and supported by management looking to increase the headcount under themselves.
I've often struggled to understand why my team is made up of only 20% engineers with the other 80% pretending to create value by holding meetings to tell engineers what to build next when I feel like it's your clients that should be doing that.
Ultimately it's engineering that becomes the constrained resource which leads to technical debt in favor of pushing out product's features.
I would venture a guess that most engineers have used (critically) more software in their lives than any non-technical person driving the development of the product. Why then are engineers not the most consulted people on the efficacy and value of new features? I think there is a big myth out there that engineers are incapable of directly handling client feedback.
Creating the _right_ thing is extremely hard.
I think it has survived so long because it provides its practitioners with two ace excuses: when things fail, they say, "what we did wasn't really agile," and when somebody proposes and improvement they don't like, it's always, "that sounds like waterfall." A team can't recover from their agile transformation until both of those phrases disappear from the team lexicon.
> “Way too much of Agile has been not about technology, but about people and about managing things and about getting stuff done — not necessarily getting the right stuff done, but getting stuff done — rather than what engineering is about,”
I'm not sure agile was ever designed to fix this. The whole process is really handy-wavy about the actual engineering: "we'll just make this a spike." The process also demonizes documentation and design work, which is antithetical to most engineering.
That being said, I love iterative development, and I like the concept of stories as descriptions of functionality. But I do think agile, as taught by most consultants, is really designed for consultants who build CRUD web-based applications. Sprints are timeboxed so consultants can charge by the spring, and stories lack implementation details because companies hiring consultants don't want or need to know how their sausage is made. The further away your product is from that area, the less effective agile is; some companies really need to design their sausage well, up front, because they are going to be eating it for years.
A process that's built up over years has become the way it is typically for good reason. And in my experience, teams forced to transition to agile will end up shoehorning their existing process into "agile" and calling it done, so most executives don't really see how their "transformation" failed.
I'm going through that right now, in fact for the past two years our team has been transforming into agile. Although when I say team, it's more the developers that are forced to work in an agile way. The business is still very much waterfall, but for them it's okay. If they want to throw a new story into the sprint, they'll just call it being "flexible", and adjusting to business requirements. It's not because they can't plan two weeks in advance.
There's also way to much time spend on story points, I always assumed these were estimates, to get a sense of how much can be achieved, if a story runs over, so be it. However here, these are seen as deadlines, a 3-point story shouldn't take longer than a day or two. Our "scrum master" is constantly asking wether we can achieve all our stories this sprint, what's the point of even estimating if you're going to do that. And recently, we now have to plan our two week sprint, day by day, committing to 2 week plan before the sprint even starts. There's nothing agile about that to me.
Here's another anecdote, a couple big teams that went the full SAFe route spent 3 years building something that ended up being thrown away and replaced in 4 weeks by 3 staff working part-time who were just given some instructions, some deadlines, and told to go code.
It's become repeatable, big teams toiling for years getting outpaced by smaller, more "agile", teams.
The balance has gotten out of whack again and it's really time to start over again. When I go back and read the original manifesto, what I see today in modern practice looks nothing like what was intended. The point in too many shops has been to accomplish the Agile things, not to deliver.
The manifesto itself says:
> Deliver working software frequently, from a couple of weeks to a couple of months, with a preference to the shorter timescale
I get the impression as to what you're witnessing is, water-scrum-fall...
See: https://i.imgur.com/6eqk7eF.png
On the flip-side, your team of renegades managed to deliver in 4 weeks, while being great, I would question how sustainable that is. Also I get the impression they had skin in the game.
> what I see today in modern practice looks nothing like what was intended
You're 100% right. I don't think it means agile should die, I think it means people have forgot what it set out to do.
Scrum existed before agile and is a framework to help people work in an agile way. However people have got too wrapped up in the orthodoxy and have forgot what agile is actually about.
My mantra is simple: Release early, release often, listen to the customer
When I first got into software development it was because of open source software. On the SourceForge website, under the “Promoting your project” section, you’ll see it say “Release early, release often. Frequent releases state loudly that your project is alive”.
Years later, I learned that this philosophy was popularised by Eric S. Raymond in his 1997 essay The Cathedral and the Bazaar. Only, his version also says “listen to the customer”, an important part that’s all too easy to forget.
If you want a stapler, you have to schedule a meeting 3 weeks in advance with 2 team leads and 3 contractors who decide what sprint "getting a stapler" will be assigned to. Then "getting a stapler" gets pushed back two sprints because some priority came along (a vice president somewhere just learned that his binder was on hold for four months). An Accenture contractor from India informs you that a hole punch is on the way. Apparently you checked the wrong box on the stapler requisition form, so you have to start the process over again.
Then the Accenture quarterly deck shows they met 97% of all stapler demands for the quarter! Isn't life so much more easier and more measurable now? But they will need to hire more contractors to keep up with capacity.
Bullshit. Back then, the term "programmer" didn't mean what it means today. A "programmer" was someone who entered a program into a computer, or even earlier, plugged in wires according to a schematic. The actual development of the program was almost exclusively done by men, even more so than today (this is not supposed to be a value judgement, nor do I want to justify the situation back then or today).
It's really disappointing to see this tired myth of a supposed "Golden Age of women in computer science" repeated in the article.
I teach CS in college. I see it every day. Women on average are more interested to work with people than men. This hasn't changed despite trying to boost girls' interest in typical STEM fields for 25 years. HR departments have been pouring money into this like mad. Hasn't moved the needle. Research has shown that girls don't fare worse in math tests if they are told beforehand that girls are worse at math. In countries where the sexes are treated more equally men more often choose thing-jobs and women more often choose people jobs.
Who thinks that if society would treat everybody completely equal, all occupations would end up exactly even distributed across the sexes? There are real differences between the sexes.
The push towards exact equal distribution in everything is futile, hasn't worked and will not work.
I think it's more important that people can choose to do what they want to do.
Sounds like a rant, sorry.
I keep hearing it touted as this kind of universal cure-all but I just do not think it is applicable everywhere. On a personal level, the more any given thing is touted to me as the solution for any and all problems, the more suspicious I grow. The more fervor, the more I draw away. The more cultish it seems (convert, adhere, rituals, special names, and then finally the narcissism of small differences in practice as exemplified by that old Emo Williams routine), the less I want to participate.
The more I have seen it shoehorned into places where it seemed ill-suited, the more this was revealed to me, yet the evangelism continues. Nothing like watching the tape backup guy, suffering from a flare of gout, hobble over to a room to perform his "stand-up" routine to hammer that home. Of course, we "probably weren't doing it right," but the more I have seen the slavish adherence to the strictures of Agile the more it seemed like this was an exercise in polishing a boss' resume so that he could say he had done The Things when he went elsewhere.
Reader, he did.
Perhaps the Agile that can be critiqued is not the eternal Agile.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chrysler_Comprehensive_Compens...
Not a good start
And I'm not talking about just engineering - I'm mainly talking about customers and management.
Most of the gains come from tighter feedback loops between engineers and other stakeholders than tend to happen without an intentional effort. This works because it is simple - tell teams to talk amongst themselves every day, get feedback from customers more incrementally than you otherwise would, etc.
Most of the rest of the promised gains need better disciplined customers and managers - ill-defined specs, dropping projects to pick something else up, only to switch back a couple months later, managers who don't pay enough attention to what's being done until it is too late, etc.
Perhaps the problem is that it is a management fad aimed at engineers. It needs a v2 aimed at nontechnical people, "become competent at asking for what you need".
- development becomes a 1st-class "business" activity a la accounting, sales---not that you necessarily do it as aanger, but you're looked down on if you can't
- a culture of "ask about the internals" becomes prevalent, where anyone who bought software without knowing how it worked was looked on as an idiot
- developer coup
> Engineering is about seeing a problem, understanding it and using the technology you’re good at to solve it as quickly as possible.
Everywhere you turn to there is someone thinking that speed is the most important thing ever. Everything must be done quickly. The best way to do something is quickly. If something takes longer, it's clearly worse.
Even in an article about "the problems with Agile", people still fall into the trap of speed.
Engineering is clearly not about solving problems "as quickly as possible". It's about solving them in the best way possible, where you first define "good" as a balance between all the advantages and all the disadvantages of each possible solution. Speed is but one of the factors you evaluate.
And if they really want to consider all of that in a dichotomous way. Who really does not want "working software", and why would I even have to "prefer" that? this is just too much fundamental that we could as well say: we don't want to work on garbage projects, and it is stupid to have an extremely good documentation of a pile of crap. But why jettison documentation if "working software" is not even considered optional to begin with? I fucking want stellar documentation. Because why not? I'm tired of reading source code all day to try to understand what things were even supposed to do...
In some industries "agile" in its original definition can make sense. In others, not at all. Yet, tons of people will pretend they do "Agile" regardless of what it is, what they think it is, and of what they do. This is sometimes some kind of management virtue signaling; except it is not signaling positive things anymore to those who work.
It really has no meaning anymore. To be honest I'm not even sure it ever had, as implemented by most, out of the industry it came from (with associated practices that were also highly contextual)
People should just avoid focusing on fashionable shallow words, and skip right to the ideas: if all of Agile and even all of Scrum is what will make your project shine, just do it, but writing essays about it is not really doing it, nor is pretending it is a kind of universal panacea, nor constructing consulting services around cult practices. If you must do the complete opposite; do the complete opposite. And tell everybody you are "agile" without an once of shame, if that can help raising money or stupid shit like that -- I mean what is even more agile than doing otherwise than "Agile" if it is a better idea in your context; so you are not even lying :p
Problems begin when that gets forgotten, and following the process becomes your job -- not following the process is doing your job wrong.
Always remember that your job is to build stuff, any way that works.
If you just "step back" from trying to control the average bunch of engineers, they will miserably fail, because they have never gone to a school that taught them how to rapidly drive business value through software. If you hire the right people, they already learned all of that, and so they'll be successful.
That's how the Netflixes of the world survive. Their organization and process would seem totally insane to any "average" tech engineering organization. But it works for them because they learned how to work together the correct way, the business got the hell out of the way, and it also invested a ton in helping them do what they need to do.
Agile does not give you any of that. Agile is just a promise of what should be happening, but it doesn't tell you how to get there at all. It's a pipe dream.
Agile is not the problem, though. It's businesses thinking the engineers are simple tools to be used to produce widgets, and if they just shove enough extra business roles and processes around the engineers, that will end up creating value. But the solution is actually to remove all that extra crap, and get the engineers to do everything in a way that the PMs and DMs and QEs etc are no longer necessary.
If you go over to http://agilemanifesto.org/ and read these simple 4 sentences, it makes sense:
* Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
* Working software over comprehensive documentation
* Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
* Responding to change over following a plan
- Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
- Responding to change over following a plan
Would any of these work for, say, building a house?
I hate agile from the bottom of my heart.
I couldn't agree more
THAT said agile was a breath of fresh air at the time and it got us to question a lot of assumptions related to how we specify and develop software.
Story points remind me of those weird units of work the cloud providers bill you for, or the company scrip that a coal mine would have issued 100 years ago. I call story points AgileBucks.
Why not just use standard units?
In our 2 week sprints we have four possible story point values - 3, 5, 8, 13. If the story should take a couple of days, it’s 3 points. If the story will probably take the full sprint, it’s 13 points. If the story is somewhere in between, pick 5 or 8.
The real problem doesn't seem to be that Agile is irrelevant, it's that Agile (and this is actually fairly quickly explicit in the Manifesto and accompanying Principles) cannot be limited to a siloed tech organization but must fully incorporate the business sponsor of the project, whether that's the firms business management for a software/services firm, whether it's an external customer for a firm doing bespoke software development, or whether it's an internal customer for an IT organization doing enterprise-internal development. And despite that being clear in the Manifesto and Principles, it very often is the case that “Agile” is seen as something the tech team is (or worse, does) that stops at their boundaries, and that fundamentally doesn't work.
There are other equally serious problems, like ritualistic adoption of fixed processes being described as “Agile”, which it clearly is exactly what Agile is most opposed to; the use of the phrase “Agile (or Scrum) ceremonies” is a clear sign that an organization has been infected with this toxic mindset.
In places I've worked without the pressure of the quarterly earnings report I've seen that developers tended to use whatever methodology worked best. It could be Agile, pair programming, or just walking over to each other's desks and talking on IM.
I guess we'll have to see if we ever have a major health care crises. Wait...
And we wonder why the hospitals didn't have enough PPE on hand. Did the MBA virus spread to hospitals and did they misapply methodologies like Lean where it had no place, except as short sighted cost cutting?
One of the major problems in industry I've seen again and again is management, etc pretending they know more about the job and it's requirements than the people doing it.
As Lean originated in manufacturing with the WORKERS making the improvements and the WORKERS being empowered (anyone could stop the line if there was a problem) it's bit ironic that a corrupted version was used later to beat workers into submission and achieve petty cost cutting versus process improvement as in the health care anecdote above.
Calling it a to-do list instead of user stories? Not aligning teams on where we are in the to-do list regularly and removing and adding things?
Agile proponents often say "waterfall", but I have no idea how you would go about working waterfall day to day.
Would you just make all your user stories/to-do's on day one and never update them and now you have waterfall?
Having entered the industry long after agile became the new normal, it seems like the whole discussion is either "stand-up sucks" or people discussing variations of what is essentially "Regularly report where you are on the to-do list, often update the teams to-do list", but never "Why not this different paradigm instead".
Maybe I am lacking imagination, but I am not really sure what a serious alternative is here.
If that's part of the original reasoning, then it was very random. R&D has not much to do with manufacturing. So I would greatly prefer an actual example from "product development" rather than car factories...
I mean what build our software is e.g. gcc. I don't know if gcc is feeling lean, and actually I don't care much :)
As an ops type usually only on the peripheral of sprints etc I feel I don't fully grasp the nuances of the different methods enough to really comment, but that just really got my attention for some reason.
Found the video, linking at the timestamp that includes the manifesto for agile (which I think has some obvious flaws)
For over a year I pushed back on story pointing and things that felt micro manage-y to me.
It was very hard on me, but it was worth seeing the productivity.
Eventually I was forced to give in to Agile with the big A and left soon after.
I can't get another management job because everyone wants to do Agile in a way I hate to manage - so now I'm a developer again... :)
But I object to the authors complaint “and it’s pushing women engineers into non-technical roles.” and elevating the primacy of engineering above all else.
People come in all levels of competencies and have all manner of skills. I don’t care if you are a man or a woman. I care about how good you are at doing the tasks that need to be done to get the job done. And in large companies there are big jobs that require a lot of people and a lot of coordination.
I work with a woman who is not a very good software engineer, but she is good at administering and coordinating the work among other software engineers and she quite enjoys doing those tasks.
While she can improve on some of her skills as a software engineer and I try to help her with those, the author’s recommendation seems to be that because she’s a woman, I should push her away from work that she likes doing, that she’s good at doing, and which is important work to do.
This is objectively terrible advice, but some might accuse me now of male chauvinism. If so, fine. But I will forward this article to my colleague to ask her what she thinks and I’ll let her opinion be the ruling decision.
To deliver any real business value following these philosophies requires an extremely mature, experienced team. Not just great engineers, but also great communicators that actually care at least a little bit about the mission/product/goal.
This simply does not scale and is a complete antithesis of 99% of organizations culture and hierarchical structure.
That's it. The more people are involved, the more complicated the process gets and all of these approaches evolve out of trying to find an agreeable and effective way of doing it so that everyone doesn't have to figure out a new solution every time.
As much of a buzzword hell as it is, I really believe that Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) is the closest thing to the right balance of trade offs.
This may be a bit different depending on the make-up and maturity of the team. Sometimes, we need daily engagement with team members and "structured" collaboration, other times we just need to make sure everyone understands the sprint goals and then get out of their way. The challenge has always been when upper management wants to see a single dashboard which boils all teams down into a set of pre-defined metrics - and then positively reinforces teams (or their managers) for hitting metrics instead of delivering solutions. Training your VP's can be exhausting.
In this situation, you'd get shot down for following rigid Agile, because the process gets in the way of delivering value. What you end up doing is using the concept of "agility" to sell some agile-lean-hybrid-involve-the-stakeholders-think-small-and-demonstrate-the-value-of-delivering-value. It's not about the Method, it's about the outcome.
No one needs to go black-and-white rigid Agile, that's where it went wrong. But agility is a good way to describe the concept of efficiently changing (and handling change).
I just feel that every article about capital "a" Agile immediately sinks to level of pedantry that is a complete waste of time, so... I didn't read the OP.
Just like the very process of software design this was meant to aid, they failed to understand the importance of clarity, brevity, and providing exacting specifications or instructions.
Fuck you, agile. This is not how engineering should be done in any profession. Thousands of hours of my career has been wasted clarifying this unclear process to swarms of people who have no single resource to learn from. And each new company brings a new “we do agile, but....” exception to adapt to, and damned be if anyone ever writes a single fucking rule of this process down, so we get to endlessly debate what is this “agile” thing at each and every opportunity.
Way too easy to "seem" productive while actually being net negative for the project.
That said, I've had excellent agile projects that have delivered huge value to the customer at cost and time well below initial estimates.
These days I ask people who shout for agile to actually explain the fundamentals to me, as though I have no clue. Very rarely do I find anyone who can hit even one of the four original core ideas and values of "agile":
And when I bring up the core ideas, and why they can work really well, I often see that the people who shout agile actually don't agree with the fundamentals.
My best team is me alone, but other than that, the best team I ever had was one in which there was no meetings, no dailies etc. It was just me and a few others, receiving the outlines of what the final product had to do, what inputs and outputs it should process, and then filling this outline with code and hard work until it was whole. It was far from perfect of course, but we weren't bothered by unnecessary processes. There was no agile back then yet....
That said, the methodologies are not the problem. The problem is peoples attitude and mentality and how they use them.
Then, the problem with frameworks like Agile is that smart people will use them wisely, and less smart people will try to apply the concepts without really grasping the ideas and not really gain anything out of it.
But you can't really prevent people from reading the book, and do stand-up scrum meetings and sprints and shit...
Unless someone comes up with something else (which most likely will be equally twisted) Agile is here to stay. I just wouldn't mind watching conversations about Agile die.
I think we need Outcome Driven Development- we define a metric measured in say graphite, we link a ticket to that asserting the ticket will make the metric change this way or that, and we commit code to make the metric change
so we start a process of defining what we want, implementing how to measure it (there could be a null metric and the ticket is to make it not null) and then measuring our success of changing the metric
this will have organisational impacts as well - no one should take a ticket without authority span to impact that metric
this will start in the direction of software as literacy or the developer anarchy
Everything else can flow from there.
It's easy to say that, but the obvious follow-on question is "and replace it with what, exactly?" Maybe the answer is in TFA, but I didn't read it yet. I hope they have something to propose, otherwise this discussion is pretty vacuous.
I think it's probably a good reinterpretation of the original manifesto that is a bit more fundamental and a bit more direct. I like the concepts a lot.
What it doesnt give any guidance to is how to organize information about how to build the right thing. If a system is very large, without some methods to understand and communicate what you are building, it just becomes ad hoc. Agile is not a product management/requirements identification methodology.
https://github.com/rayfrankenstein/AITOW/blob/master/README....
Here's an archive link https://archive.is/wip/OFF0F
The set of methodologies and processes that ensued, as well as the entire industry of coaches, consultants, evangelists and "practitioners" was probably coming from a good place - trying to propose an implementation for how to put in place those abstract values and principles, or to help with that. The commercialization, envy and corruption that followed is what the problem is. "Agile" has become a synonym for "cargo-cult brainless implementation of sprints and stand-ups to copy something called scrum but effectively doing things in a very much waterfall and old fashion that isn't even remotely close to the original intent".
The problem is of semantics order. What does need to "die" is the "agile" industry, with cargo-cultish coaches whose only value is to repeat Scrum says X, XP says Y, Agile says Z, my other customers do Ω, without trying to convey the reason behind those implements ; "agile" methodos like "safe" which have very little agility backed in and whose "Enterprise Architects" proponents usually don't get any of the intent.
But take a look at the manifesto[1] and tell me that you want it to die, I feel like the arguments will be very complex. Re: the that we should become "engineers" (semantics and cargo-cult again), there's a very good reason why agile applies well to software, but not to mechanical engineers. The economic equations between those two practices are completely different[2][3], the "engineering" phase of mechanical engineering is cheap compared to the production costs and so iterations have effectively an extremely high overhead cost, whereas the "engineering" phase of software engineering represents most of the cost, and so iteration and adaptability have a very low overhead.
But saying "agile needs to die" because of how the "agile industry" corrupted it is similar to saying "email needs to die" because what you see most is spam.
[1]: https://agilemanifesto.org/
[2]: https://www.developerdotstar.com/printable/mag/articles/reev...
Agile alone is insufficient to successful products, which the original proponents would tell you. It’s a body of practices. There are more practices than just those. People seem to want “12 steps to an easy rich life” and want to scream when someone offers only 6 of them.
Most of the Agile practices the industry has adopted and evolved without calling them agile. So in that sense, it’s a “success”.
But agile coaches often are so focused on the original 20 year old practices and they miss the bigger picture of business and products and supporting technology, and the evolution that’s taken place in each during that time.
Any software method that is delivering software for users to consume has to be complemented by outcome-focused approaches like user-centered design, product development, customer development, and budgetary funding / management practices that don’t weaponize the use of openness, sharing, and metrics for political purposes that hurts people’s self worth. If you’re missing those, agile isn’t going to help you much.
Ultimately just letting engineers be engineers is partly how we got into this mess in the first place. People don’t know how to organize themselves without some kind of constraints: design constraints, time, physics, customer constraints, quality, etc. Talented teams turned loose that ultimately deliver little of value is a cliche at this point. Agile tries to use time as a constraint to limit active work in progress to force the delivery of customer visible / valuable results that can be tweaked. It’s not the only way to constrain the problem space, but “cost of delay” does have a fairly universal explanatory value in showing what really matters to a business, as lean product development and manufacturing has shown. But that might not be the outcome you’re looking for.
whatever process or practices you do, Agile or not, it has to be organized end-to-end to be tied to some kind of tangible mission or outcome or else it’s just a form of self-deception. For example, if we think products need to be usable and solve actual problems, and that design can evolve, then Product owners need to speak for the Customers and have the power to make decisions. Engineers need to be empowered to make the technical decisions. These seem obvious but they’re rare: committees and political strings attached are the norm. If you get both an empowered balanced team of product, design, and engineering you’ve got potential for an engine of collaboration and learning, which is the whole point. Don’t build projects, build human/techno systems that grow and improve and evolve.
Agile is also not universally applicable and much of the resentment stems from a religious conversion therapy or Developer Rehab approach to marketing (even though some really could use a stint in rehab). Agile is applicable to some kinds of software (user-Centered software in particular), which happens to be a big chunk of industry. It isn’t applicable to everything, such as deeply technical components, pure or applied scientific R&D, or certain kinds of exploratory work. Nor is it applicable to jobs with set and unchangeable requirements.
People are best to understand there are a spectrum of practices and processes suited to different environments and stages of organizational evolution. Or they could reject such complexity and nuance and just adopt SAFe, I guess.
Generally speaking, lean is a tool for reducing various kinds of 'waste' and 'doing more with less'. That's the part people seem to focus on anyway. The problem is that people become myopic. Lean becomes the justification for premature optimization and focusing on details that don't matter.
Sometimes, waste is good. Or, stated differently, not all waste is equal. If you have 5 machines that each produce $1000 of value per hour run, and you're attempting to go lean by rearranging them so you can lay off a $20/hour employee, then you are focusing entirely on the wrong thing.
Lean is often pushed with the idea that employees shouldn't be standing around doing nothing, or that you shouldn't produce excess material which will sit in a pile. The problem with this is it often fails to account for needed excess capacity, and when something goes wrong, everything falls apart.
The correct move (depending on margins) is usually to hire more inexpensive humans to stand around and make sure the expensive machines never stop generating value because you overburdened one of the humans. When you want to make things faster, you don't stop producing when the next machine in the process can't keep up (producing a pile of unused parts). You buy another machine that performs the next process or figure out what it needs to run faster.
Lean is the methodology most people use when they can't make big changes that will have a major impact on production. It's a tool for making the existing (possibly broken) system function better. It's culturally good to focus on reducing waste, but often it's the waste you're not measuring or thinking about that's killing you.
Lean isn't bad any more than optimization is bad, it's just not the tool you typically want to be starting with. I work directly with customers, have no deadlines that aren't self imposed, and couldn't tell a story point from a scrum master, so I can't say if the failures of lean manufacturing implementation extend to agile, but I'd be curious to hear if they do.
A tool I find more useful than lean: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_constraints