
Beyond Agile: The Studio Model - Chris_Newton
https://www.forbes.com/sites/cognitiveworld/2019/08/28/agile-and-the-studio-model/
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ealexhudson
I think the author mixes up a few "start-up" concepts (MVP, failing fast,
etc.) with "agile" concepts (people over process, early delivery, etc.) and
therefore is kind of shooting all over the place. I'm not going to argue that
scrum is somehow not "true agile" (by definition, agile-or-not is entirely
driven by the context of the team), but there's definitely a few points of
warning in the Studio model proposed:

* a single architect / visionary to provide the "creative direction" within a project is a huge bottleneck. It's possible for showrunners to get down into the weeds of the scars on Orc's faces on a fantasy show; for a large software architect to get into the mechanics of on-disk data format is obviously failure. Filming is short sprints of hard deadlines in a way software development simply isn't.

* "magic happens about 85% or more": eek. Have we not learned that long periods of development with nothing visible are dangerous?

There's lots in here that I agree with; some of it seems a bit self-
contradictory (i.e. "we need redundancy / understudies at all levels" versus
"hire and level up creative people"), but overall this just reads like another
list of "here's a lot of stuff that often goes wrong. My manifesto is to not
do that". It's not amazingly actionable.

~~~
Chris_Newton
I didn’t entirely agree with the original author either; the comments on MVP
also jarred a little with me. That said, the two points you mentioned in your
bullet points both resonated with me.

I do agree with the original author that software development needs a clear
vision of what you’re trying to achieve. Without someone to articulate that
vision and then everyone working to realise it, it is easy to fall into a trap
where lots is going on and yet there is little _useful_ progress being made.
What you characterise here as a bottleneck, I might characterise as having
focus. This is very much about the big picture and co-ordinating different
contributions, though, not about micro-management.

I also have a lot of sympathy with the argument that software projects don’t
necessarily add value incrementally just because the code is being developed
incrementally. To borrow the traditional bad car analogy, you can have the
most ergonomic steering wheel ever designed and you can put the best
performing tyres on your rims, but until you’ve connected them, the value of
the overall product is still negligible.

Of course software is different in nature to a physical product, but I still
think the critical point in the development process — where you have not just
evidence of product-market fit and potential market but a sustainable offering
that you can actually sell in large enough volumes or at a high enough price
to justify the development — is often only reached towards the end of a major
round of development work. Visibility of incremental progress towards that
point might be reassuring and motivating, but neither of those is the same as
having value as a deliverable product. So while I’m all for manageable,
incremental, sustainably paced development, I do think there is a real world
danger of emphasising that too much and consequently taking an unnecessarily
circuitous route to the critical point, making the development slower and more
expensive than it could have been.

~~~
ealexhudson
All the points he made about design up-front I'm entirely on board with:
obviously it's difficult to say how much is necessary / right / overkill, but
you definitely want to think about what you're building.

TV/film/studios as a model don't offer a particularly compelling vision (to
me, anyway). Games work a lot like that, and I think they're probably some of
the worst development jobs you can have (as a rule).

~~~
Chris_Newton
Yes, the “studio” terminology also seems a slightly awkward fit here. There
were some good points made, but I’m not sure it’s the best analogy.

------
Chris_Newton
I found this a thought-provoking article. It’s a follow-up to the author’s
previous piece, _The End of Agile_ [1], which was discussed on HN a week or so
ago[2].

[1]
[https://www.forbes.com/sites/cognitiveworld/2019/08/23/the-e...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/cognitiveworld/2019/08/23/the-
end-of-agile/)

[2]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20776316](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20776316)

