
Maybe Agile Is the Problem - clumsysmurf
https://www.infoq.com/articles/agile-agile-blah-blah
======
etripe
Each time one of these articles is written, they forget some essentials:

1\. homo sapiens sapiens evolved to collaborate with about 150 people

2\. enterprises are the shared mythology to enable larger scale collaboration

3\. part of that shared mythology is "corporate culture": a paraphrase for
management culture

Then people go on to conclude one of two extremes:

a) Agile is the problem

b) The way Agile was implemented is the problem

Agile isn't the solution or the problem because it doesn't deal with issues of
scale. Large scale collaboration is difficult because people think and act in
local tribes: sales vs IT, business vs developers, etc.

We're not seeing a crisis in methodologies. We're seeing a leadership crisis.
Some of these real problems include:

\- failing to trust: let a person to do their job and give them the autonomy
required to succeed

\- failing to plan: thinking in terms of quarterly budgets over multi-year
plans

\- failing to support employees and instead shifting blame when things
inevitably fail

\- failing to invest: minimal raises, mass layoffs, outsourcing...

\- failing to lead: having no vision, hiring silver bullet transformation
coaches

\- failing to understand the market: not understanding what the core business
or core demographic is, how to grow, how to do it sustainably (economically or
ecologically)

\- failing morality: despite "corporate values", following the absolute
minimum requirement of the law, lobbying to lower legal standards, sometimes
to disastrous effect

Not all of these apply to all companies, but too many do.

------
wodenokoto
What are the alternatives to agile? As a junior I have only worked under 2
systems: “we want to do agile”, and agile with stand ups and user stories.

Both have been presented as an alternative to waterfall, as if that are the
two things you can do.

For software with very little end user surface (big data pipeline with lots of
Datawashing and training of different models that eventual spits out a
prediction) user stories seems extremely shoehorned.

“As an end user a want a product recommendation” and that’s your whole product
right there. From there on it just starts getting awkward. “As a data
ingestion pipeline I want data to ingest”. Seriously?

~~~
officialchicken
You may not actually be practicing agile, rather participating in a cargo-cult
of agile. Be aware of "magic" rituals versus required activities to keep
moving the project forward. If it's software (w/o a manufacturing aspect)
you're probably doing some variant of spiral-based development since software
is never done - it's only abandoned. Hybrid-waterfall methodologies do exist,
and it's cheaper to write specs and designs than to write and debug code. Use
Given-When-Then (GWT) format specs to validate, because "As a birthday gift, I
wanna pony" format doesn't verify and validate.

