The end of Agile?

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The End of Agile
I knew the end of Agile was coming when we started using hockey sticks. Every morning, at precisely eight o'clock, the team of developers and architects would stand around a room paneled in white boards and would begin passing around a toy hockey stick. When you received the hockey stick, you were supposed to launch into the litany: Forgive Father, for I have sinned. I only wrote two modules yesterday, for it was a day of meetings and fasting, and I had a dependency upon Joe, who's out sick this week with pneumonia.
THIS IS A FORBES ARTICLE.
 
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Grandma Bates

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I particularly liked the idea that Agile does not work with data driven applications because his company refuses to make use of existing, well tested standards when sharing information across systems.
 
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Beebo Brink

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Agile is a tool, and like any tool it can be abused. If you try to drive in a nail with a wrench instead of a hammer, don't blame the wrench for the bad result.

Our parent company uses agile for their custom code projects, but they've also swallowed up our intranet development in that process, which is annoying and inefficient. The intranet is built on SharePoint, which means there is very little custom programming needed for most of our enhancements; we rarely need complied code, mostly we're just editing HTML/CSS or adding some client-side javascript. A change that should take a week can take up to a month because they shoe-horn us in to the Agile process using sprints, even though we're a support team that doesn't have the luxury of ignoring client requests while we're working on in-company projects. We then have to go thru QA with testers who have no idea what to look for, so it takes us longer to write out testing scripts than it would be to do it ourselves (Yes, that link is blue now).

But I don't blame Agile for that situation. I blame the rigid management structure that hands everyone a wrench, whether they need it or not.
 

Eunoli

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Having worked for clients who thought agile means "no requirements at all" (which it doesn't) and clients who thought "it means doing waterfall much faster" (which it doesn't) and clients who thought it means "invite everyone to the standups: pms, analysts, whoever - and then let them change the iteration's scope daily" (the worst of all) - I get this.

The simple fact is that agile needs scrummasters and agile coaches with the ability and level of power to keep things in line, moving along and not just a way to heap ridiculous demands for visible results daily on the devs - and it is rare that companies do that. The reason agile isn't working in a lot of places is simply that the people implementing it don't hold the power to make it work.
 

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The End of Agile


THIS IS A FORBES ARTICLE.

Oh please, kill it off with prejudice. :mad: And take sAFE with it while you're at it. :poop:

Honestly I didn't mind working with teams using Scrum Agile as a tool (we do hardware with software and it's a little more difficult for hardware to fit the model).

But when engineering decided to move to sAFE it has become like a "religion" with engineering management and has my life turned into a living hell. Absolute hell. My workload has tripled. They are trying to change my title and change my responsibilities into something that I never agreed to do. (So far I have successfully fought that). Four really good engineers have walked off the job last week because of the thoughtlessness they used when putting together the teams of people and incredibly stupid two day PI planning sessions that go from 8:00 in the morning until 9:30 at night and expect the engineers to worship the process (management just loves them little stickies and the yarn). 🙄

The tracking and electronic management tools they've given us suck and don't reflect what we do and engineering has created a silo where only they matter. F... support, export, certification, operations, marketing, shipping or manufacturing, it's all about engineering and the rest of the company can take a flying leap.

Yes, this is a rant and I'm sort of sorry, but damn it felt good to say how much I hate sAFE. :flail: DIE SAFE, DIE. :voodoo:
 

Kara Spengler

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Agile is a tool, and like any tool it can be abused. If you try to drive in a nail with a wrench instead of a hammer, don't blame the wrench for the bad result.

Our parent company uses agile for their custom code projects, but they've also swallowed up our intranet development in that process, which is annoying and inefficient. The intranet is built on SharePoint, which means there is very little custom programming needed for most of our enhancements; we rarely need complied code, mostly we're just editing HTML/CSS or adding some client-side javascript. A change that should take a week can take up to a month because they shoe-horn us in to the Agile process using sprints, even though we're a support team that doesn't have the luxury of ignoring client requests while we're working on in-company projects. We then have to go thru QA with testers who have no idea what to look for, so it takes us longer to write out testing scripts than it would be to do it ourselves (Yes, that link is blue now).

But I don't blame Agile for that situation. I blame the rigid management structure that hands everyone a wrench, whether they need it or not.
Yes, any tool can be good or bad. Using a tool to make things more productive is good. Taking a day of meetings to use a tool to write a document nobody will ever read is just a waste of time.
 

Kara Spengler

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So, I once worked at a place where they called their development process "agile" but it functioned like waterfall with more meetings.
We are doing some combination of agile and lean (I never quite figured out what things came from which initiative). Plus we have plenty of projects that are somewhere in the waterfall model.
 

GoblinCampFollower

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Just another case where management discovers magic dust and sprinkles it everywhere instead of only where it's of most use.
Many bad managers can't accept that something can run just fine without them sticking their noses in it.

I have never worked in a big software development team of dozens or more developers, so I can't speak to that situation. But I know that on a small team, frameworks like that are very inferior to just having a good relationship with your coworkers. My company pushes agile and jira, but for me, this is extra work with exactly no value added.

The tracking and electronic management tools they've given us suck and don't reflect what we do and engineering has created a silo where only they matter. F... support, export, certification, operations, marketing, shipping or manufacturing, it's all about engineering and the rest of the company can take a flying leap.
...huh, never heard of a company putting engineering first. What is your product if I may ask?

My old company was very centered around sales. ...this meant the sales could make deals on things we had no hope of delivering, lol.
 

Snakey33

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the main problem of computing and programmers is much of them (like mounting intranets or doing apps) is they are not "proffesionals" in the strict mean of word..... much of them makes apps and other things that are pure Shit.......plenty of buggy functioning or lots of "collateral effects"....
 
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the main problem of computing and programmers is much of them (like mounting intranets or doing apps) is they are not "proffesionals" in the strict mean of word..... much of them makes apps and other things that are pure Shit.......plenty of buggy functioning or lots of "collateral effects"....
If you are going to put stuff in quotes you have an extra f in "proffessionals" in the strict meaning of the word.
 

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Speaking of which, why doesn't Unicode include the lolwut pear yet?
 
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