
Agile does Not work - jrs235
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/agile-does-work-oleg-vishnepolsky?trk=eml-b2_content_ecosystem_digest-recommended_articles-97-null&midToken=AQHAReKO7Y9oIw&fromEmail=fromEmail&ut=01-rW2bI4plns1
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dalke
In modern use, "agile" means little more than "not waterfall".

As such, it's hard to tell if agile works because sprinkling even a little bit
of agile dust on a project means it's "agile."

Then again, I come from a RAD background, and I don't like how the rich
description of different models and approaches, like what Steve McConnell
described in "Rapid Development", had mostly devolved into a more ambiguous
"agile."

On a bit of a tangent, I came across papers from industrial process management
that made a similar complaint about Toyota's continuous improvement method.
Quoting from the introduction to
[http://freyssenet.com/?q=node/748](http://freyssenet.com/?q=node/748) :

> With this book I hope we are able to show that Toyotism or ‘lean production’
> as presented in the bestseller The Machine that Changed the World by Womack,
> Jones and Rose (1991), is not, as they seem to claim, the only possible
> industrial organization of the future.

[http://www.design4change.com/LinkedDocuments/Torslanda%20to%...](http://www.design4change.com/LinkedDocuments/Torslanda%20to%20Uddevalla%20via%20Kalmar.pdf)
calls it a "humanistic alternative" and "Socio-technical", and "Reflective
production".

Do these alternatives also apply to software development? Would they even
better?

The agile software people I've talked to have never heard of these
alternatives.

------
dragonwriter
Agile isn't a thing you do, and it isn't a thing that works or doesn't work.
Its very little more than the recognition that what works is highly specific
to the group and task, coupled with specific warnings against practices that
were commonly and harmfully adopted as one-size-fits-all straightjackets at
the time the manifesto was written.

Particular methodologies -- like Scrum, which is often conflated with Agile --
may or may not work (and, more particularly, may or may not be ideal for
certain classes of project), but that's a very different issue.

OTOH, I think that Agile has a critical problem which is revealed by the fact
that people confuse it with various methodologies (particularly Scrum) -- it
is so nebulous that no one actually considers the manifesto to be a thing, and
everyone just accepts whatever canned, one-size-fits-all methodology some book
or consultant sold them (usually Scrum or a derivative, though I remember when
people who said "Agile" were more likely to really mean "XP") is what Agile
is, which is fundamentally the kind of mindset Agile was a reaction _against_.

Because Agile -- the manifesto itself -- contains no clear actionable
recommendations, just value statements, everyone with a concrete methodology
to sell once Agile became a popular buzzword just decided to sell their
methodology _as_ Agile.

~~~
dalke
How do you tell if something is agile?

If we drop the word "agile", what would we lose? For that matter, couldn't we
just call it "software engineering"? The goal of engineering is to choose from
different possibilities to come up with a cost-effective solution.

I came of age as a professional software developer in the 1990s, before the
Agile Manifesto. I was (and still am) in the RAD school of thought. Steve
McConnell's "Rapid Application Development" was one of the big software
engineering books of the era. It certainly doesn't promote a "one-size-fits-
all straightjacket", so I don't recognize your statement as reflecting my
understanding of the pre-Agile era.

I have also read a lot of accounts of software development pre-Agile
Manifesto, from the Mac development to the game software described at
[http://www.filfre.net/](http://www.filfre.net/) to the first web browsers. I
don't recall any of them using a waterfall model or any of its variations.

This is also a bit of a hot button for me. All too often I see people arguing,
ahistorically, that first there was waterfall and then there was agile. I am
one of the skeptics that Wikipedia describes at
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterfall_model](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterfall_model)
as saying "the waterfall model is a false argument used purely to market
alternative development methodologies."

~~~
dragonwriter
> How do you tell if something is agile?

If the thing is not _a person 's high-level framework for decisionmaking about
the process of making software in a particular group_, its easy, its not
"Agile" in the sense of the manifesto.

If it is such a framework, its Agile iff it applies the values in the
manifesto as its guiding principles.

> If we drop the word "agile", what would we lose?

Very little. I think that one of the big problems of the manifesto is that,
while it really was a reaction to a common (then and now) cargo cult approach
to software development methodology and, secondarily, particular elements of
particular methodologies that were commonly adopted with that approach in
certain domains at the time the manifesto was written, it _wasn 't_ any kind
of fundamental revelation or new approach. (And, arguably, articulated the
issue it addressed less well than numerous other sources that _also_ argued
that the _method_ of work itself should be subject to a continuous and
critical review for fit to the particular team and goals, and not adopted
based on generalized lore.)

> I came of age as a professional software developer in the 1990s, before the
> Agile Manifesto. I was (and still am) in the RAD school of thought. Steve
> McConnell's "Rapid Application Development" was one of the big software
> engineering books of the era. It certainly doesn't promote a "one-size-fits-
> all straightjacket", so I don't recognize your statement as reflecting my
> understanding of the pre-Agile era.

The methods of any of the various methodologies in the RAD tradition can be
applied as one-size-fits-all straightjackets just as much as any other
methodologies (at the time the manifesto was written, they were trendy enough
that it was probably happening then just as it is now common with supposedly
"agile" methods like Scrum, and just it had previously been -- and still was,
in some domains -- with various waterfall methods.)

> I have also read a lot of accounts of software development pre-Agile
> Manifesto, from the Mac development to the game software described at
> [http://www.filfre.net/](http://www.filfre.net/) to the first web browsers.
> I don't recall any of them using a waterfall model or any of its variations.

I'm not sure why you think this is relevant to the post you are responding to,
which doesn't mention the waterfall model or any of its variants or suggest
any particular relevance of them. (And I also think it suggests a certain
bias, because certainly government/enterprise software was still then -- and
in many cases is still _now_ \-- often built on methods that are commonly
referred to as waterfall models [in the case of government, often with
institutional mandates that approximate the stages of the waterfall model.])

> This is also a bi of a hot button for me. All too often I see people
> arguing, ahistorically, that first there was waterfall and then there was
> agile.

Its not ahistorical to argue that the cluster of methodologies typically
labeled "agile" (which they shouldn't be) are, in fact, newer than the cluster
labeled waterfall models. It would, of course, be grossly inaccurate to assert
that there was nothing in between; iterative models (RAD, spiral model, etc.)
were in between, both chronologically and conceptually.

Its true that the iterated models _often_ get ignored, kind of like Generation
X in Boomers vs. Millenials discussions.

> I am one of the skeptics that Wikipedia describes at
> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterfall_model](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterfall_model)
> as saying "the waterfall model is a false argument used purely to market
> alternative development methodologies."

Actual documented methodologies in the group labeled "waterfall models" do, in
fact, exist and were widely accepted at one point, and had not been generally
displaced (though there were newer models challenging them) at the time the
agile manifesto is written. The idea of _the_ waterfall model as a concrete
methodology is a bit mythical, but things like the Structured System Analysis
and Design Method certain _did_ exist (and descendants of that approach are
still being used in real institutions.) Asserting that waterfall models are a
pure strawman that exist only to sell "agile" models is false as a matter of
readily verifiable fact.

~~~
dalke
I am in agreement with most of your response. I want to follow up on a couple
of points.

> "I'm not sure why you think this is relevant to the post"

Well, it's not. It's a response to the comment concerning "practices that were
commonly and harmfully adopted". I want to soften that from "commonly" to
"sometimes".

However, it's hard for me to really justify that. Agile comes out of
government/enterprise. That's clear from the manifesto, which refers to
"contract negotiation", and where the principles refer to "the customer's
competitive advantage". Neither are really relevant to, say, the end-user
games that I mentioned earlier, or to software one writes for oneself for fun.

Within government/enterprise organizations then and now, I agree that many use
various modified versions of waterfall and, as you say, straight-jacketed
methodologies.

What I don't know is, how many software projects in the 1990s were using
heavy-weight processes, vs. ones which would be now called agile? (Or a third
category of none-of-the-above?) For example, in the mid-1990s I worked for an
academic research group of ~20 people, and we distributed the source and
binaries for free so I also did some support for external users. There was no
emphasis on processes and tools, nor comprehensive documentation, nor contract
negotiation. Most users were within a few tens of meters from me, there was
close collaboration, and I could do several build/releases per day if needed.
According to the manifesto, I was agile, yes?

But that approach was also not uncommon for other research or in-house
software, and it wasn't much different from the software development process
at the startup I joined in Palo Alto a couple of years later (during the dot-
com era), or the places I worked at or consulted at since then, all doing
scientific research support software development.

By count, and perhaps even by budget, were there more of these small-scale
agile-like projects than there were heavy-weight government/enterprise
projects? If so, then waterfall would have been relatively uncommon in
practice.

> "Asserting that waterfall models are a pure strawman that exist only to sell
> "agile" models is false as a matter of readily verifiable fact."

I do not argue that waterfall is a pure strawman, rather that many agile
proponents present the dichotomous choice of "waterfall" vs. "agile", and use
that comparison to market an alternative, agile method as the alternative
method. (I like your Boomers/Gen.X/ Millennials example - slackers represent!)

This isn't a strawman, but ... I don't have a word for it. Choosing the
weakest opponent, propping it up by always talking about it, showing you're
approach is better, than concluding you are best.

Laurent Bossavit has written much about this, but I couldn't find the one I
remember reading before, so I'll quote
[https://www.infoq.com/articles/bossavit-agile-ten-years-
on/](https://www.infoq.com/articles/bossavit-agile-ten-years-on/)

> The most dangerous distortion of all is the notion, sadly prevalent today,
> that Agile consists of a handful of competing "brands" of processes: Scrum
> versus Extreme Programming versus Lean or Kanban. In the interest of pushing
> this or that brand, the interesting details of our young history are papered
> over.

------
bdcravens
The most entertaining part: scrolling through the list of commenters and
seeing how many list their title as "Agile Coach", "Scrum Master", etc.

~~~
jrs235
If IT isn't working then you're not really doing IT. You must be doing
something else. No true Scotsman!

~~~
evoik
Sounds like "if it doesn't work you're not praying hard enough".

~~~
jrs235
At first glance I read "if it doesn't work you're not paying enough".

