
Should developers abandon Agile? - MilnerRoute
https://it.slashdot.org/story/18/06/09/0219229/should-developers-abandon-agile
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mlthoughts2018
Don’t use any named, taxonomic workflow process at all. Not Agile, not Scrum,
not Kanban, not Waterfall, not RUP, nothing.

Instead, organically mix and match and customize any bits or pieces of any of
them, along with ad hoc, situation-specific workflows, as needed — as
determined by the specific situation, deadline, requirements, personnel and
preferences involved.

If you’ll benefit from spending time on exact software estimates or a retro
meeting, do it. Two months later if people need to take a month for a more
complex prototype, rendering 2-week increments silly and wasteful in terms of
overhead, then change how you work and skip those parts for a while.

When process is fixed by _any_ prescriptive method that at the heart attempts
to track progress and dictate one specific cadence or manner of working and
communicating about progress, it devolves to something like fractal
measurements of the coast of Britain.

You think your measurements are getting more and more precise, and you can
come up with whatever surface area of progress to make it look like you are
measuring more and more. But no matter what, it becomes _about_ the prescribed
system, and stops being about common sense, fluid, adaptable, day-by-day
adjustable workflow tailored to what trusted workers are telling you they
need.

Creative mental labor is just not amenable to Taylorism. It just doesn’t work.
Doesn’t matter which Fancy Name you give it. You have to give up the idea of
_any_ fixed, prescriptive method, and just use constantly-updateable local
conventions.

(Of course this assumes you are interested in productivity. Often the
bureaucratic adoption of things like Agile is about creating middle management
surface area for political power struggles and/or corporate surveillance.
Companies agree to pay the cost of productivity lost to the workflow drag in
exchange for creating Dutch books of story points or to be able to roll up
what are effectively contextless time sheets to executives who believe it
equates to some type of accountability. I don’t have much advice in these
cases; only interested when the assumption is to optimize productivity.)

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mindcrime
The obvious corollary to this would be "In favor of _what_ exactly?"

For all the bad things you can say about "agile" (which isn't even a "thing"
to begin with) one has to ask "what's the better alternative?" Do you want to
adopt Waterfall? RUP? Most of the other well known methodologies (XP, Crystal,
AUP, etc.) _are_ "agile" methodologies anyway.

If anything, I'd argue that developers need to start pushing back when brain
dead managers and idiotic consultants come along and push ideas as "Agile"
that are very explicitly *not" "agile" in either the "big A" or "little a"
sense, and demand that management actually learn what the Agile Manifesto says
and apply those principles from the top down.

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pards
Ron Jeffries' original article can be found here.

[https://ronjeffries.com/articles/018-01ff/abandon-1/](https://ronjeffries.com/articles/018-01ff/abandon-1/)

