
Agile is Poisonous - tablet
http://mdubakov.com/post/46844381610/agile-is-poisonous
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api
"We tried 1 week and 2 weeks iterations. Neither worked out. With short
iterations there was a constant pressure to get shit done and technical debt
accumulated like a huge garbage heap. It is impossible to squeeze a good
solution into a short timeframe."

This is the most common Agile failure mode I've seen. You have to finish by
the end of the iteration, so you're very heavily biased toward ugly hacks and
Rube Goldberg machine coding. Elegance never fits in a sprint.

The last total Agile Kool-Aid drinker company I worked for also coincidentally
had the most massive shit heap of code I have ever seen in production. It was
a heterogenous mix of VB.NET, Ruby, Java, shell scripts, and Python running on
Linux and Windows (and a bit of Mono on Linux), all glued together with duct
tape and chewing gum. The Scrum Master was really proud of it, called it a
Service Oriented Architecture. He could make pretty charts of it that made it
look good, but if you lifted the hood it looked like garbage and required at
least 10X the Amazon EC2 footprint it should have required. It was probably
also a security nightmare, and was definitely hell to maintain.

That experience really destroyed my interest in Agile, since I could see very
clearly how the problem was emergent from Agile's short sprint and exclusively
deliverable-focused structure. The programmers were actually decent coders,
and it wasn't really their fault. (Except maybe the heterogeneity...)

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tablet
I believe the resulting situation is not what you should blame agile for.
Shitty code created by shitty developers. No exceptions.

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api
Good developers can only write good code if they can think and plan. Neither
of these is ever a sprint objective. The objective of a sprint -- in practice
-- is always to bang out the absolutely minimal quality hack required to
complete the sprint's objectives.

~~~
tablet
Nothing distracts good developers to write good code. There is NO excuses. Bad
management? Bad mood? Fuck it. Find another job if management can't live with
good solutions. Again. No excuses.

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philwelch
Folks, this post is an April Fool, and not even a very funny one at that.

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jph
+1 Funny. Congrats on walking the fine line of parody and realism!

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USNetizen
In all honesty, the shortcomings written about here are not a defect in the
process(es), but appear to me to be simply weak project management. Especially
since your ScrumMaster just up and quit. That is unheard of in a strong
project-oriented culture.

You need a strong leader to get the team to buy-in to these processes. Of
course nothing will work if you don't do that - people are generally averse to
change and will do anything to prove "new ways" will never work.

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Killah911
Nicely done, at first I was in disbelief, but then realized that it's satire.
It's unfortunate that I know of companies that have implemented so-called
"agile" and basically didn't even get what the heck it was supposed to be.

1-2 week sprints, Mini-waterfall, bringing back deadlines. I've actually been
thru this kind of "fr-aglie" implementation by bone headed leaders who were
aware of the buzzwords and hadn't carefully examined what the process(es)
entailed.

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tablet
Thanks, I've tried my best :)

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ChuckMcM
I thought this was hilarious, especially that on 'blame day' you couldn't
defend yourself in Nerf battles. It left me wondering "Ok, what are these
folks trying to do?" and then "Oh, he's one of the founders of
<http://www.targetprocess.com/> , I get it."

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irukavina
This is obviously an April Fools joke :-)))

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emarutian
yep

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nonamegiven
I'm always leery when the process gets more attention than the work. If your
process has a name it's in great danger of getting too much attention.

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myke_cameron
I generally agree, but I'm pretty sure this is supposed to be a parody...if
not then this is truly absurd.

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dasil003
It's definitely a parody, but it's disturbing how many seeds of truth are in
there.

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tablet
I think every good parody has some truth.

