
Developers Should Abandon Agile - ingve
https://ronjeffries.com/articles/018-01ff/abandon-1/
======
airfreak
Never ascribe to malice, that which can be explained by incompetence.

I don't mean to be harsh on anyone, but after working for over a decade in
enterprises, mediocrity seems to be the norm. There are of course bright and
insightful people, but mediocrity is pretty much the standard. Take any good
process, technical practice or whatever and see it be abused and misused.

With Agile what happens is a mediocre implementation that usually leads to the
usual complaints we see about Agile. The number of times I've been told about
how Scrum enables self-organising teams only to be told I have no control over
the process because it has been standardised across the company.

Mediocrity demands cookie cutter solutions that can be standardised without
need to engage thinking. If you work in an incompetent organisation,
department or team, then there's no hope that agile or anything else can help
you. In fact, the religious nature of Agile often works in favour of
mediocrity as critics, even well-meaning ones, get labelled as waterfall
sympathisers.

~~~
some_account
I hate Enterprise environments now after working in one for just a couple of
years.

They are all about conformity, standards, following established routines,
established chain of command. Endless meetings due to the need to 'sync' every
little decision with team leaders, product owners, scrum masters, who in turn
syncs with the team members on other teams, making sure information gets
distorted, lost, confused.

I'm never again working in Enterprise until I'm 60 and just want to sit on my
ass, do minimum work, get payed and retire.

~~~
bradknowles
With respect, that will never happen.

The days of being able to "retire" went out the window, when companies stopped
giving employees pensions, and they started offering 401k plans.

Then they decided to get rid of all the employees, and use exclusively
contractors for whom they don't have to pay any benefits at all. No 401k for
you!

~~~
closeparen
If your 401k isn’t earning enough returns to let you retire, neither is your
employer’s pension fund, and it will become insolvent. The difference between
pension and 401k is unlikely to be make-or-break, and when it is, it’s more
likely to break the pensioner (corporate bankruptcy, taxpayer sticker-shock,
etc).

~~~
tcbawo
Pensions are great when they work, but it's impossible to predict solvency at
retirement age. It's one of the most under-reported financial travesties, but
your pension can be taken away when you need it. Even the public pensions are
targets these days.

------
sevensor
Methodology is a polite fiction overlaid on company culture. Authoritaian
cultures will turn any methodology into a cattle prod. Even a methodology that
prioritized singing Kumbaya and gently praising each other over shipping
software would turn the workplace into a dystopian hellscape in the wrong
hands.

------
philwelch
I quipped in a retro once that uppercase-Agile is agile the same way the
Democratic People's Republic of Korea is a Democratic People's Republic. This
was shortly after a teammate of mine described the three-to-four-hour biweekly
sprint planning meetings he was subjected to on a previous team.

Here's a tip: calculate the cost of every meeting by taking your salary (or an
estimate of the average salary in the room), dividing by 52 and then again by
40, doubling it, and multiplying by the number of people and then again by the
number of hours in the meeting. Alternatively, nevermind the salary
calculations: subjecting 13 people to a 3 hour meeting wastes roughly a full-
time human-week of productivity.

~~~
some_account
It doesn't matter to Enterprise that money is being lost. It's millions every
day being wasted and they are still there, going strong. They are no longer
competing because income is automatic and guaranteed unless they do something
catastrophic.

~~~
tcbawo
Also, without paid overtime, workers are often expected to make up
productivity outside of the meetings.

------
dragonwriter
This seems to fail to recognize—and consequently retain—the core failure of
Agile. It's too squishy.

Agile is about finding and continually adapting methods that work for the team
in its actual concrete environment, but the manifesto doesn't address how to
do that, and the Agile literature is all about particular methodology and not
about how you manage evaluating and adapting processes as a tesm.

The critical part of Agile has almost no coverage in the Agile literature.

------
LoSboccacc
Agile works well in a well defined subset of projects. The precondition for
success are well defined and known, a blanket agile ban is as sterile as
global agile adoption.

And I say this as an agile critic.

~~~
dragonwriter
> Agile works well in a well defined subset of projects.

No, specific methodologies like Scrum, Kanban, XP, etc., might do that (with
different subsets for different methodologies.)

Agile is more an set of priorities for choosing how to build software than a
methodology, though it often gets misused as a name for some methodology, most
often recently some variant of Scrum (though early on, XP was probably more
common.)

~~~
LoSboccacc
Did I say agile is a methodology?

~~~
dragonwriter
No, _I_ said that what _you_ said is true of methodologies, but not of Agile.

~~~
LoSboccacc
except it is true that for whatever you want to call agile there are plenty
projects agile values' simply won't and can't work.

i.e. hardware drivers. kernels. libraries built to spec. software upgrades.
most products that aren't built on commissions too.

------
mixmastamyk
I like many things about Agile and Scrum but their goals (in practice) are
often a paradox of "flexibility, performed as rigidly as possible."

~~~
Someone
There are good things in agile and scrum, but Agile and Scrum? As soon as
people start capitalizing their Methodology they stop thinking about what they
do and why.

------
yosito
> poor developers in the “Code Mines of Ohio”

I'll have you know that Ohio has some pretty good developers and some pretty
good Agile training.

~~~
chrisbennet
I think he was sympathizing with the developers, not deriding their skills.

The “poor” in “to all those poor souls lost at sea” doesn’t refer to the
economic class of the souls.

~~~
yosito
Ohio isn't lost at sea. We've got a pretty good tech scene.

------
DanielBMarkham
It's interesting to think of moving "past" Agile to some other place.

There's an old saying in consulting. It sounds really facile and dumb, but
it's actually quite deep: _people like doing what they like doing_. That is,
inside of each of us we have proclivities to act in different ways. I like
thinking conceptually and writing. This other person likes thinking tactically
and keeping things organized. No matter what situation we find ourselves in,
somehow or another I end up writing and thinking conceptually and this other
person is responsible for keeping organized and worry about immediate
problems.

The organization -- any organization -- is simply a collection of people like
that. They have a natural equilibrium, and no matter what kinds of things you
say you're doing or not doing, they eventually come back to that happy spot.
What we're really talking about here is a version of regression to mean, only
in a social sense.

If what I'm saying is true, what conclusions can we draw? My money says that
anything worth doing should be something that makes you uncomfortable in some
fashion. I'm not talking unrealistic deadlines or micro-management. "Being
uncomfortable" could simply be the development team taking a day and working
alongside the people they're trying to help.

I looked at this entire problem sideways in my Info-Ops book:
[https://leanpub.com/info-ops](https://leanpub.com/info-ops) \-- Instead of
looking at what people _did_ , I looked at how information was handled and
moved around. I found it insightful. One of my conclusions is that discovering
and creating anything of value is all about tests, either business or
development tests. Thinking in terms of tests allows solutions to happen in
dozens of ways, but whatever solution is chosen, you get the results you want.
Compare that to the ways we usually do things, which is the reverse. Usually
we start with some idea of how we want to do the solution and then try to use
that to make something people want -- but it seems like we're never really
sure that we're building the right stuff. And meanwhile we're all back to
doing things we like doing.

Tests allow us to be ourselves while constraining what we're doing to things
that are valuable. I think people grok the idea of tests when it comes to TDD.
Somehow they lose focus when it's about other things, like processes, methods,
rituals, and so forth. But frack, that's where they matter the most.

I don't think you go beyond agile by changing the name or disavowing it.
Unless we come to terms with what the root of the problem is? It'll just be
the same thing ten years from now with new buzzwords. We've been doing this
for decades in technology. We should be able to do better by now. I don't want
to keep playing whack-a-mole with buzzwords and people's happiness.

