
IBM Is Going Agile - artribou
http://blogs.wsj.com/cio/2015/04/27/ibm-cio-designs-new-it-workflow-for-struggling-tech-giant/
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logfromblammo
Alternate headline: "Agile Development Ski-Jumps Over Shark!"

Alternate alternate headline: "Final Nail in Agile Development Coffin is Big
and Blue."

Agile is dead. Long live the new development process buzzwords.

It is now time again to rename everything, come up with new jargon and
trademarks to describe the patterns and anti-patterns of the development
processes that actually work for us, and set those words free. Then they can
be co-opted and peddled by consultants. Afterward, they are embraced,
extended, and extinguished by management. And then the new words change
meaning to describe all the old things, and the circle of business buzzwords
turns anew.

~~~
Pelerin
So, just to be clear, the fact that it's being used by a big company, and/or
referred to in the WSJ means it's useless?

~~~
logfromblammo
I didn't say the process is useless. That remains to be seen. My point was
that the events described in the article have stretched the meaning of Agile
so far that it can now be used to describe any software development process at
all, regardless of whether it actually conforms to the principles that
originally inspired Agile.

Agile can now mean anything. Therefore it means nothing.

The new IBM process won't be entirely useless. It will likely be very
expensive for IBM consulting customers and slightly damaging to the souls of
the software professionals required to use it. It will be the IBM development
process, with a new set of names and jargon terms.

Imagine, for example, that the new development process is called Celeriflex.
All the SV startups jump on Celeriflex like fleamen on a Belmont. They crank
out awesome software and make huge exits. Some of those startup veterans use
their payout to create consultancies to teach Celeriflex to other software
businesses. They make money hand over fist. Then businesses whose primary
product is not software notice. Their management hears good things about
Celeriflex and orders the CTO/CIO to implement it. Eventually, the largest
companies for whom software is a significant source of revenue keep doing what
they have been doing for decades and use words culled from Celeriflex
consultant documentation to describe it. At that point, Celeriflex is dead.
The SV startups are using Speedcode now...

~~~
walterbell
Add a few diagrams and you can brand your meta-process linguistic lifecycle :)

------
M8
Agile in a big company:

[http://dilbert.com/strip/2005-11-16](http://dilbert.com/strip/2005-11-16)

[http://dilbert.com/strip/2007-11-26](http://dilbert.com/strip/2007-11-26)

~~~
yarrel
Some years ago I came to realize that someone I was working for was using
"Agile" in the sense of the first strip.

We weren't at a big company...

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CountHackulus
I worked at IBM for 5 years, and some of the teams I was on used "agile"
development methods. In that they used the names, but our "scrums" were an
hour long, in a meeting room, with everyone bringing their laptop. Management
more than 1 level up expected waterfall-like development, so it all just
meshed badly.

I really don't hold out much hope that this is going to work out that well
without a whole bunch of training and people actually wanting it.

~~~
oldmanjay
I spent a long time at a boutique consultancy that specialized in rescuing at-
risk software projects for fortune 100 firms. Mainly, that meant we got very,
very good at building up waterfall adapters for our internal processes.

I won't say we were following agile, exactly, but the concept remains
approximately the same. Big company management thrives on the mistaken notion
that they can plan out the world years in advance. The key insights that made
our adapters work were 1) no one has enough of a memory to hold anyone to
those plans even six months down the line and 2) no one expects anything to
work anyway, since they're all used to their plans falling over.

Which isn't to say this is going to work. I suspect that, like all things
recent IBM, any success they find will be more attributable to inertia than
execution excellence.

edit: clarification

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tomelders
Ouch. My heart goes out to all those men and women at IBM who are about to get
"Agiled".

~~~
Shivetya
I always look at these announcements in the same way as gazing in on the
office of some mid level executive where the bookshelf has a book for every
business process type and programming language.

It is the old, "we do that" done for appearance sake, execution and actual
knowledge rarely come in to play. If anything it is a club to wield to drive
out those who management does not like; usually those who do get something
done regardless of the the rules to prevent that

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jhallenworld
I'm surprised that there is no mention of Rational Team Concert:

[http://www-03.ibm.com/software/products/en/rtc](http://www-03.ibm.com/software/products/en/rtc)

Used in a big way to implement Agile within IBM and provides a nice coherent
system for task management.

~~~
raverbashing
I'd rather unclog blocked toilets with my bare hands than touch anything with
"Rational" on its name

~~~
karlmdavis
As someone who regularly uses Git (and prefers it), RTC really isn't all that
bad. I'd even go so far as to recommend it for some teams/companies.

~~~
raverbashing
As someone who wasted time and sanity with that ginourmous piece of crap
called Clearcase, I'd rather flush money down the toilet than ever give money
to IBM/Rational again

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chrisbennet
"The mission is to have innovation and the speed of small companies..."

If they keep laying off people, eventually they _will_ be a small company.
Problem solved!

~~~
grecy
> _If they keep laying off people, eventually they will be a small company._

They'll _be_ a small company, but they'll have the innovation and speed of a
large company :)

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konradb
I'd trust this all more if it was coming from the teams back up, rather than
edict going down.

~~~
bcg1
Also keep in mind this article is in the Wall Street Journal... take it with a
grain of stock price PR salt... sadly developers and engineers at IBM are
going to get the sh* end of that stick.

Anecdotally... we have a lot of IBM stuff here and had a consultant here last
week teaching a class... he was an old guard IBMer, about to retire... every
day he was here I was treated to at least 1 story about how great it used to
be to work at IBM, and how those days are over.

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x0rg
Enterprise companies are all going agile this year, I bet someone from Gartner
is suggesting this shift... and the result is clearly not that effective.

~~~
a1b2c3
Seriously, who instigates these fads? It's like every year there's some new
business model that everyone follows like a bunch of lemmings. Last year (or
the year before?) it was everyone working in the office (as opposed to at
home) because someone at Yahoo! decreed that was the way to go.

~~~
mbesto
If it isn't obvious, announcements like these are purely PR. Once the general
public starts reading the stories like "Facebook is agile and uses open
offices", they begin to associate the experience of their Facebook iPhone app
with the result using agile and open offices. They then ask their boss why
their CRUD accounting/finance/analytics app can't look and feel like FB and
then those bosses (the CRUD vendor clients) put pressure on their vendors
(such as IBM) to change or they're going elsewhere.

------
Nursie
( _standard disclaimer - I do not speak for IBM. I 'm not even a current
employee_)

We were doing this at big blue seven years ago IIRC, and while it's a large
company to transition like this, I don't think it's exactly new.

It's not quite agile as the writers of the agile manifesto would have it, but
then most 'agile' seems beset by consultants and process, and IBM probably do
it better than a bunch of other places I've worked.

RTC is a bit of a heavyweight and quite unwieldy though. Give me git and a
text editor any day of the week....

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krschultz
#1) Nothing says Agile like top down process design!

#2) I didn't quite believe Michael O Church's anti-Agile essay [1], but
nothing justifies it more than this quote:

> The system is designed to foster accountability. And with that, finally,
> comes speed.

[1] [https://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2014/06/20/on-
programme...](https://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2014/06/20/on-programmers-
deadlines-and-agile/)

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tomjen3
That seems unlikely. Big companies like big ships have a lot of inertia. They
may adapt "Agile", but almost certainly in name only.

~~~
pmlamotte
This was the case in my few months there. We had "sprints" and "stories" but
75% of all the stories in every sprint would just get pushed to the next
sprint with no thought behind it. Part of that was because our stories
themselves were so broad and were worked in a long term waterfall manner. Our
standups were just everyone falling asleep while each person took their turn
saying what they did the previous day. If someone did actually have
impediments or useful information to convey, most did not pay attention enough
to notice. And finally, we didn't have retrospectives, which are a great time
to be able to reflect on how to improve as a team and prevent issues in the
future.

A lot of this came down to the people, but it didn't help that there was no
leadership to help steer it in a good direction or notice the underlying
issues. Story points were fabricated to help give good spreadsheets and charts
to upper management, which led to us working insane overtime before our
release due to how behind we were.

This is just one anecdote though, and I know there were other departments much
better off than mine was. It was enough for me to want to get out though after
I realized how difficult it was to get any change in place.

~~~
technofiend
Sounds like pro-forma agile - phagile - if you will.

I was taught agile by a certified scrum master, but the dude was completely
serious about 'this just lets you fail faster, and you _will_ fail, and often,
as this process starts' which really helped.

He was right. It took a while to learn how to keep people honest and create
succinct stories with a real scope. Particularly the guys who want to be
architects or engineers perceive their jobs to start with the abstract and
work down to specificity.

They can struggle with "What should this screen to today. Right now, today?"
and want to talk about database design, message passing, data structures or
anything else that doesn't answer the question.

At least for me and my planning it was far easier to make stories as small as
possible and let the complexity build into a release which was roughly plotted
out after velocity stabilized (even if into an upward slope).

I was probably doing it all wrong, but the hardest part was always keeping
anyone from saying "well 6 more 2 weeks sprints means your release date is x,
right?". Everyone wanted to just take the backlog depth, divide by velocity
and project a date.

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mrdrozdov
If IBM didn't use Agile, what did they use?

The non-greedy benefit of Agile is that work and how work happens becomes more
understandable in a consistent and reasonably-well studied manner.

~~~
jhallenworld
"Waterfall" with detailed project schedules in tools like MS-Project (which
BTW, is still useful for all-process oriented projects). I'm a little confused
by the article since the parts of IBM I've seen have been using Agile for
years (scrums, iterations, epics/themes/stories).

~~~
ibmthrowaway271
I'm part of a team within IBM that's been using Agile (Scrum) for the last 6
years.

Originally it was just quite close to Waterfall dressed up as Agile but "they"
(senior management) are finally getting their heads around it.

------
metaphorm
if IBM says its "going agile" then its time to start funeral arrangements for
agile.

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webaholic
like putting lipstick on a pig...

