Agile/Scrum is one of those things that are impossible to criticize. You can come up with a well-reasoned critique of Agile and there's always some Agile evangelist that pops up to tell you that you're not doing "real agile" and, therefore, your experience is invalid.
At the same time, I have now done software engineering for over a decade, in many roles and teams, and I have never seen Agile or Scrum to lead to the development of a good piece of software. I guess we were using it wrong.
I’ve seen agile done well once. Yes it does happen. The process was not described, spoken of or even considered. It just existed between a few like minded decent engineers.
Their manager got an “agile PM” forced on them and it broke.
The problem is charlatans, dictators and career ticket shufflers that deliver little to no ROI and generally abject chaos.
I work at a company that did Agile/Scrum ok - it wasn’t perfect but we had regular retros and we tried to improve our processes and we were given some leeway from management to have some of the work required to support those processes into our sprints.
Then the CTO left, and was never replaced, then the layoffs came and a competent PM was replaced with a junior. Entire design department replaced with a single junior as well. Engineering gutted. Ok, lay-offs happen but at least I still have a job.
Then came “we’re waterfall now”. You know what didn’t come with it? Actual planning, documentation or specs or anything typical of “waterfall”. Estimates are now guessed before anything is defined and turned into commitments. You know what we still had? “Daily stand ups”, “backlog grooming”, two week “sprints”, and no retrospectives. No opportunity or agency to try to make things better - just endlessly stuck in my own personal hell.
Now we have projects that are supposed to take 2 months now taking 6. We have last minute spec changes that require massive rewrites because UAT isn’t done until the end of the entire project. “PM is slow to write out requirements” so we’re basically expected to just guess what they are based on very small selection of unfinished design flows.
And of course, executive wonders “why does engineering take so long to deliver”.
I started calling this “scrumerfall” or even ”fragile”. It’s basically the worst of both with none of the positives.
I don’t know what point I’m actually trying to make…just get like ranting and this seemed like a good time lol
> You can come up with a well-reasoned critique of Agile and there's always some Agile evangelist that pops up to tell you that you're not doing "real agile" and, therefore, your experience is invalid.
What I've seen the most is people putting up straw men in place of Agile, and proceed to attack the strawman in spite of being repeatedly pointed out they are pummelling a straw man.
Scrum is easy to criticise. Agile less so.
One such Agile criticism is about principle “that working software as the primary measure of progress”. I understand the sentiment but it’s not enough, it’s got to meet the customer’s needs.
Scrum is far too sprint release coupled. Sure you could separate them, but are you really doing Scrum then?
"Agile" was defined so vaguely in the beginning that it became a kind of template for everyone to project their (often contradictory) ideas and dreams on to.
Scrum fixed that by being as bad as it was precisely defined.
I can get what the originators of agile were getting at but they explained themselves super badly.
>You can come up with a well-reasoned critique of Agile and there's always some Agile evangelist that pops up to tell you that you're not doing "real agile" and, therefore, your experience is invalid.
Just the typical "No True Scotsman" fallacy [1], happens all the time when there is no good defense of the position.
The rarely discussed cornerstone of Agile is trusting the team and letting them organise themselves. For most organisation this represents a huge internal change in power structure.
The Agile industrial complex can't really sell a message to their customers (i.e. managers) that the development teams should have the power and run themselves how they feel fit. This message amounts to "if this works, we can fire the managers". Not a popular message for managers.
So, instead of building on an agile foundation, companies just add some story points and funny sounding meetings on top of the old structure and nothing really changes. It is Agile cosplay.
I’ll take this a step further too and say that if Agile is being introduced by management, it means they don’t trust their teams to organize themselves. Agile, as sold, can’t actually work in that environment. The battle is already lost.
I wish more people understood this. Nobody should be arguing for Agile anymore. Don't say "no, but-" or "that is not what the Manifesto says-" because you're only strengthening the case for Agile as propagated by the fraudmasters simply by virtue of it sharing the same name as the thing you're arguing for. Leave the term behind, find something else.
The problem is that it's a neverending treadmill of naming if you do that. Every good idea will be taken over by fraudsters. A lot of good ideas are already tainted by this, and while you have to pick your battles, there's something to be said for standing your ground on naming.
Yes. What I have said before, for the same reasons, is that when the average office that says "we do the Agile", what they mean is that they have top-down, upfront planned micromanagement via tools such as Jira. *
This has nothing in common with the values of the Agile Manifesto. In fact it's more like the opposite of them.
* I hate Jira. Jira is not the cause of the problem. People's desire for a tool like that is cause of Jira. Kill Jira, and it would soon be replaced with something much the same.
We’re going to be officially moving to Agile! Soon.
By which I mean the project planning committee has created a multi-hundred page document with precise BPM-style workflow charts (based on Jira, obviously), and non-technical managers have started being sent on multi-day training courses to learn how to follow them.
To oversimplify it, he says "agile" has become a noun when it was always meant to be an adjective. In other words, if you are "doing" agile, you aren't really being agile.
The agile approach is generally academic mumbo jumbo that is rarely effective/efficient in large-scale industrial practice. Coming from an industry where functional safety is paramount, I think the agile approach is rarely appropriate unless you want to effectively waste everyone's valuable time with unnecessary overheads. If the product has already been launched or is at a pre-launch stage AND the team is small and professional enough, it might even work, but then why bother with such processes and roles overheads in the first place!
Irrespective of the chosen approach, it’s crucial to systematically elicit requirements, document specifications, and rigorously verify and validate everything. Implementation should ideally be supported by thorough unit tests, and, most importantly, all artifacts must be traceable across different abstraction layers and to the required level of detail.
Page wont load for me. BUT, this title is the first sensible thing I’ve heard someone say about Agile in 10 years.
I just don’t use the word Agile. Too many people like it for the wrong reasons, or hate it for the wrong reasons. Everyone has a different understanding of it. It’s just not useful.
If I say “let’s use Agile” it’s just going to lead to arguments and misunderstandings.
Id always rather be more specific about which Agile idea I think will be useful. E.g. “let’s build a prototype before we waste time planning too much detail” or “lets get something built and released so we can learn more about what our customers want” etc.
The closest I've found to agile is when a team says they use "extreme programming", but I still find it funny that even EP goes against the "Individuals and interactions over processes and tools", or at least walks a tightrope on whether it's a process or not.
I see people kind of assuming that this agile principle implies there should be no process at all. Do you make that assumption or where does the perceived contradiction come from?
Scrum is the thing that has tainted "agile" in my opinion, because Scrum is so widespread that many people think they're the same thing.
Leaving aside the "agile is a philosophy, not a methodology" argument, there are well-defined agile methodologies other than Scrum. I've worked at a couple Kanban shops and, while our dev processes were far from perfect, most of the things people routinely hate about "agile" just didn't come up at all because they're actually Scrum features.
If the thing you don't like involves the words "sprint" or "standup," you are complaining about Scrum, not agile.
Another problem is that the Agile OGs keep overselling their methodology.
They keep saying that waterfall just doesn't work, yet almost all commercially successful (and unsuccessful) software is produced that way, whether they claim to use Agile or not. Would it be better if they used "real Agile"? Of course! But you only ever have to be just good enough.
I wish that was a joke, but it's Zed so... No, you can't replace customer collaboration with more programming. When you're in a programming hole of misunderstood solutions, you can't fix that by doing more programming. When things keep changing without good reasons, you can't fix that by doing more programming, etc.
i_have_an_idea|2 years ago
At the same time, I have now done software engineering for over a decade, in many roles and teams, and I have never seen Agile or Scrum to lead to the development of a good piece of software. I guess we were using it wrong.
thimp|2 years ago
Their manager got an “agile PM” forced on them and it broke.
The problem is charlatans, dictators and career ticket shufflers that deliver little to no ROI and generally abject chaos.
web3-is-a-scam|2 years ago
Then the CTO left, and was never replaced, then the layoffs came and a competent PM was replaced with a junior. Entire design department replaced with a single junior as well. Engineering gutted. Ok, lay-offs happen but at least I still have a job.
Then came “we’re waterfall now”. You know what didn’t come with it? Actual planning, documentation or specs or anything typical of “waterfall”. Estimates are now guessed before anything is defined and turned into commitments. You know what we still had? “Daily stand ups”, “backlog grooming”, two week “sprints”, and no retrospectives. No opportunity or agency to try to make things better - just endlessly stuck in my own personal hell.
Now we have projects that are supposed to take 2 months now taking 6. We have last minute spec changes that require massive rewrites because UAT isn’t done until the end of the entire project. “PM is slow to write out requirements” so we’re basically expected to just guess what they are based on very small selection of unfinished design flows.
And of course, executive wonders “why does engineering take so long to deliver”.
I started calling this “scrumerfall” or even ”fragile”. It’s basically the worst of both with none of the positives.
I don’t know what point I’m actually trying to make…just get like ranting and this seemed like a good time lol
foofie|2 years ago
What I've seen the most is people putting up straw men in place of Agile, and proceed to attack the strawman in spite of being repeatedly pointed out they are pummelling a straw man.
turkey99|2 years ago
pydry|2 years ago
Scrum fixed that by being as bad as it was precisely defined.
I can get what the originators of agile were getting at but they explained themselves super badly.
SigmundA|2 years ago
Just the typical "No True Scotsman" fallacy [1], happens all the time when there is no good defense of the position.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman
midasz|2 years ago
euroderf|2 years ago
sime2009|2 years ago
The Agile industrial complex can't really sell a message to their customers (i.e. managers) that the development teams should have the power and run themselves how they feel fit. This message amounts to "if this works, we can fire the managers". Not a popular message for managers.
So, instead of building on an agile foundation, companies just add some story points and funny sounding meetings on top of the old structure and nothing really changes. It is Agile cosplay.
pitched|2 years ago
SPBS|2 years ago
GauntletWizard|2 years ago
drewcoo|2 years ago
Asking software engineers to name things? Now you have two problems.
SideburnsOfDoom|2 years ago
This has nothing in common with the values of the Agile Manifesto. In fact it's more like the opposite of them.
* I hate Jira. Jira is not the cause of the problem. People's desire for a tool like that is cause of Jira. Kill Jira, and it would soon be replaced with something much the same.
misnome|2 years ago
By which I mean the project planning committee has created a multi-hundred page document with precise BPM-style workflow charts (based on Jira, obviously), and non-technical managers have started being sent on multi-day training courses to learn how to follow them.
It’s going to be a shitshow!
4pkjai|2 years ago
“We have don’t have assigned desks”.
KevinMS|2 years ago
Agile is Dead https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a-BOSpxYJ9M
To oversimplify it, he says "agile" has become a noun when it was always meant to be an adjective. In other words, if you are "doing" agile, you aren't really being agile.
codex_beta|2 years ago
Irrespective of the chosen approach, it’s crucial to systematically elicit requirements, document specifications, and rigorously verify and validate everything. Implementation should ideally be supported by thorough unit tests, and, most importantly, all artifacts must be traceable across different abstraction layers and to the required level of detail.
chris_nielsen|2 years ago
I just don’t use the word Agile. Too many people like it for the wrong reasons, or hate it for the wrong reasons. Everyone has a different understanding of it. It’s just not useful.
If I say “let’s use Agile” it’s just going to lead to arguments and misunderstandings.
Id always rather be more specific about which Agile idea I think will be useful. E.g. “let’s build a prototype before we waste time planning too much detail” or “lets get something built and released so we can learn more about what our customers want” etc.
bazil376|2 years ago
quectophoton|2 years ago
The_Colonel|2 years ago
koreth1|2 years ago
Leaving aside the "agile is a philosophy, not a methodology" argument, there are well-defined agile methodologies other than Scrum. I've worked at a couple Kanban shops and, while our dev processes were far from perfect, most of the things people routinely hate about "agile" just didn't come up at all because they're actually Scrum features.
If the thing you don't like involves the words "sprint" or "standup," you are complaining about Scrum, not agile.
Tabular-Iceberg|2 years ago
They keep saying that waterfall just doesn't work, yet almost all commercially successful (and unsuccessful) software is produced that way, whether they claim to use Agile or not. Would it be better if they used "real Agile"? Of course! But you only ever have to be just good enough.
benbruscella|2 years ago
viraptor|2 years ago
EchoChamberMan|2 years ago