The Agile Cult
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Agile has been praised in the IT world almost as a religious cult; and a cult it is. Those managers who buy into this IT kindergarten principle have created an increase in IT costs that wouldn't make sense to those who see it for what is it - a huge time waster that can be replaced by being accountable for your work. Furthermore, paired programming has certainly been curtailed because of the push to work from home. Yes, virtual meetings can allow the process to take place, but now in a more cumbersome way. I say this because I watched a company I worked for go from getting praises and glory emails from the business partners to silence, crickets. Business meetings that turned into an hour long dead silence, or worse, many that did not even show up, or those attended became much more muted or even silenced; afraid to push back on the nonsense of it all. We went from cubes to cubified areas, to picnic tables where noisy phone conversations, casual chatter, and people shuffling around the room, reduced concentration to a trickle. With the meeting schedules, you are lucky if you get 2-3 days of work done a week. Multiply this times the number of days for the project to complete and you get into a real problem of proving that the expense is truly worth the time. I won't even get into the paired programming philosophy, where you have just doubled the cost of development on an on-going basis. Projects that took several months to complete now take a year or more. Anyone with any common sense simply cannot justify the added time and expense that is supposed to be offset by the claim to reduce scope creep and code errors. IT groups who push back and slam the door on businesses who attempt to add additional functionality many times end up losing in the end as being inflexible. Agile preachers will produce data and charts pointing to how you will really save time by suffering through all this. Large sessions are put on by Agile evangelists praising the Agile gods for giving us this process. This is especially true of projects where only 1 or 2 people work on it. While I would admit that the IT groups in a project that requires more than 3 people need to have meetings to make sure everyone is on point, it does not need a full blown carnival of meetings and daily stand-ups to accomplish this.
I think you read too much blah blah or is in a poor working environment.... From the last 5 company I work on agile is kind of we decide what's next every 2 weeks... And also it's not other methodology. Like it's NOT waterfall. (I dunno what other "methodology" there are.. and Project Manager love these, so they need a name to describe what they do)
A new .NET Serializer All in one Menu-Ribbon Bar Taking over the world since 1371!
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Agile has been praised in the IT world almost as a religious cult; and a cult it is. Those managers who buy into this IT kindergarten principle have created an increase in IT costs that wouldn't make sense to those who see it for what is it - a huge time waster that can be replaced by being accountable for your work. Furthermore, paired programming has certainly been curtailed because of the push to work from home. Yes, virtual meetings can allow the process to take place, but now in a more cumbersome way. I say this because I watched a company I worked for go from getting praises and glory emails from the business partners to silence, crickets. Business meetings that turned into an hour long dead silence, or worse, many that did not even show up, or those attended became much more muted or even silenced; afraid to push back on the nonsense of it all. We went from cubes to cubified areas, to picnic tables where noisy phone conversations, casual chatter, and people shuffling around the room, reduced concentration to a trickle. With the meeting schedules, you are lucky if you get 2-3 days of work done a week. Multiply this times the number of days for the project to complete and you get into a real problem of proving that the expense is truly worth the time. I won't even get into the paired programming philosophy, where you have just doubled the cost of development on an on-going basis. Projects that took several months to complete now take a year or more. Anyone with any common sense simply cannot justify the added time and expense that is supposed to be offset by the claim to reduce scope creep and code errors. IT groups who push back and slam the door on businesses who attempt to add additional functionality many times end up losing in the end as being inflexible. Agile preachers will produce data and charts pointing to how you will really save time by suffering through all this. Large sessions are put on by Agile evangelists praising the Agile gods for giving us this process. This is especially true of projects where only 1 or 2 people work on it. While I would admit that the IT groups in a project that requires more than 3 people need to have meetings to make sure everyone is on point, it does not need a full blown carnival of meetings and daily stand-ups to accomplish this.
I think this rant is more against scrum than against agile in and of itself. I also think that mindlessly implementing Scrum is a very bad idea. The scrum ceremonies (stand up, planning, review, and retrospective) all take too much time in 2-week sprints. Personally, I think that for any kind of mature product, 2 weeks to develop a shippable feature is too short, unless you can do it all in parallel, which is unlikely. Agile should be about taking the ideas that work for you, your team, and your project. And it requires that management and client understand what you're doing. As for pair programming: that is not a necessary part of agile. I never worked in a full pair-programming environment (I don't believe it would work), but pair programming sessions do yield good results, IME. It doesn't double the cost, because it's much more likely to be correct and it helps in sharing knowledge around in a team. That said, if your employer starts talking about implementing SAFe: run and don't look back.
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Team-of-one is the best.
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Richard MacCutchan wrote:
o we followed the rules until the deadlines got too near, when we were told to revert to our normal mode of working, and get the job done.
That's funny. You were less agile with Agile, but more agile without it. :rolleyes:
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The group I was in was doing Agile already, but without the kindergarten classes. But since pair programming IS part of Agile, not practicing it means that one is not doing pure Agile.
Pair programming as intended is wasteful and almost never done. But sharing office space with one or more coworkers and exchanging small setbacks, roadblocks, pointers and basically rubberducking and soundboarding each other has worked very well for me in the past. Indeed I hope my next workplace will have such an atmosphere. As a programmer with ADHD I do poorly alone - I may write a metric crapton of code in a week and gaze at all wikipedias articles for a month because SQUIRREL!
GCS d--(d-) s-/++ a C++++ U+++ P- L+@ E-- W++ N+ o+ K- w+++ O? M-- V? PS+ PE- Y+ PGP t+ 5? X R+++ tv-- b+(+++) DI+++ D++ G e++ h--- r+++ y+++* Weapons extension: ma- k++ F+2 X
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Agile has been praised in the IT world almost as a religious cult; and a cult it is. Those managers who buy into this IT kindergarten principle have created an increase in IT costs that wouldn't make sense to those who see it for what is it - a huge time waster that can be replaced by being accountable for your work. Furthermore, paired programming has certainly been curtailed because of the push to work from home. Yes, virtual meetings can allow the process to take place, but now in a more cumbersome way. I say this because I watched a company I worked for go from getting praises and glory emails from the business partners to silence, crickets. Business meetings that turned into an hour long dead silence, or worse, many that did not even show up, or those attended became much more muted or even silenced; afraid to push back on the nonsense of it all. We went from cubes to cubified areas, to picnic tables where noisy phone conversations, casual chatter, and people shuffling around the room, reduced concentration to a trickle. With the meeting schedules, you are lucky if you get 2-3 days of work done a week. Multiply this times the number of days for the project to complete and you get into a real problem of proving that the expense is truly worth the time. I won't even get into the paired programming philosophy, where you have just doubled the cost of development on an on-going basis. Projects that took several months to complete now take a year or more. Anyone with any common sense simply cannot justify the added time and expense that is supposed to be offset by the claim to reduce scope creep and code errors. IT groups who push back and slam the door on businesses who attempt to add additional functionality many times end up losing in the end as being inflexible. Agile preachers will produce data and charts pointing to how you will really save time by suffering through all this. Large sessions are put on by Agile evangelists praising the Agile gods for giving us this process. This is especially true of projects where only 1 or 2 people work on it. While I would admit that the IT groups in a project that requires more than 3 people need to have meetings to make sure everyone is on point, it does not need a full blown carnival of meetings and daily stand-ups to accomplish this.
The Agile Manifesto is tiny, the implementation is the problem. Scum is an implementation of agile. How people implement it, and then actually execute on it is the pain point. Pair programming (or over seeing a junior) via screen share is far better for ME (emphasis on opinion) then sitting next to someone and the screen further away then sitting on own computer and seeing their screen. Individuals and interactions over processes and tools Working software over comprehensive documentation Customer collaboration over contract negotiation Responding to change over following a plan
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Pair programming as intended is wasteful and almost never done. But sharing office space with one or more coworkers and exchanging small setbacks, roadblocks, pointers and basically rubberducking and soundboarding each other has worked very well for me in the past. Indeed I hope my next workplace will have such an atmosphere. As a programmer with ADHD I do poorly alone - I may write a metric crapton of code in a week and gaze at all wikipedias articles for a month because SQUIRREL!
GCS d--(d-) s-/++ a C++++ U+++ P- L+@ E-- W++ N+ o+ K- w+++ O? M-- V? PS+ PE- Y+ PGP t+ 5? X R+++ tv-- b+(+++) DI+++ D++ G e++ h--- r+++ y+++* Weapons extension: ma- k++ F+2 X
In most offices, you ARE in a shared space for sound-boarding - I did it all the time. I do not have a problem with that. And I have no problem going over to others and describing issues/ideas. Most mature adults will do that on their own, and not require a sheep herder in order to force it. And as (supposedly) mature responsible adults, we all should be doing what we need in all aspects of application development. We should not need to be 'forced' by Agile tactics to accomplish what we are supposed to be doing without it.
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You're not entirely wrong. I am weird. But I eat customers which involves approaching them, especially when they're unsuspecting.
Real programmers use butterflies
lol. You'll just confuse them. Back to the lab with you. I've worked with a couple of people with really high intelligence and passion (over the years). Nothing wrong with the rest of us or you, but some of you are just in your own little orbit. I made sure to send food to engineering from time to time. *Always* got my bug fixed.
Charlie Gilley “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759 Has never been more appropriate.
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In most offices, you ARE in a shared space for sound-boarding - I did it all the time. I do not have a problem with that. And I have no problem going over to others and describing issues/ideas. Most mature adults will do that on their own, and not require a sheep herder in order to force it. And as (supposedly) mature responsible adults, we all should be doing what we need in all aspects of application development. We should not need to be 'forced' by Agile tactics to accomplish what we are supposed to be doing without it.
I never got into the pair programming thing, but I just had a small epiphany. Do PCs work with two keyboards? A keyboard and mouse is probably the most peculiar thing about a developer (one of the reasons why I hate new laptops - getting used to the keyboard). I just have this vision of two developers beating each other with keyboards.
Charlie Gilley “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759 Has never been more appropriate.
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The Agile Manifesto is tiny, the implementation is the problem. Scum is an implementation of agile. How people implement it, and then actually execute on it is the pain point. Pair programming (or over seeing a junior) via screen share is far better for ME (emphasis on opinion) then sitting next to someone and the screen further away then sitting on own computer and seeing their screen. Individuals and interactions over processes and tools Working software over comprehensive documentation Customer collaboration over contract negotiation Responding to change over following a plan
And you need Agile to perform those 4 items? They all seem like common sense to ME (emphasis on opinion too).
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The Agile Manifesto is tiny, the implementation is the problem. Scum is an implementation of agile. How people implement it, and then actually execute on it is the pain point. Pair programming (or over seeing a junior) via screen share is far better for ME (emphasis on opinion) then sitting next to someone and the screen further away then sitting on own computer and seeing their screen. Individuals and interactions over processes and tools Working software over comprehensive documentation Customer collaboration over contract negotiation Responding to change over following a plan
I agree that the implementation is the issue, and I think that the OP suggests that it's the Agile perfectionists who ironically don't embrace the spirit of the thing and force the processes and tools of agile implementations to prominence over the individuals and interactions. I've never worked in an Agile office, but I do love the manifesto, if not the reports of implementation. In our office, we meet twice a week for basic concerns and discussion of things upcoming, and we share online workspace in a way that allows us to be an extra pair of eyes on any issue (not paired programming, but old-fashioned lending a hand). I would like to have more input into future projects, especially the refactoring and updating of the site, as the agile way seems to inspire.
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I think you read too much blah blah or is in a poor working environment.... From the last 5 company I work on agile is kind of we decide what's next every 2 weeks... And also it's not other methodology. Like it's NOT waterfall. (I dunno what other "methodology" there are.. and Project Manager love these, so they need a name to describe what they do)
A new .NET Serializer All in one Menu-Ribbon Bar Taking over the world since 1371!
Not sure what you are saying about 'reading' blah, etc. I described what I was experiencing - a poor work environment created by the Agile leader and management conducting kindergarten classes for adults who they believe are not responsible and need to be herded around like cattle. We had every 2 week intervals as well; and after removing daily standup times and business meetings, we all realized we were only developing about 2-3 days a week; which is ridiculous and expensive.
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Richard MacCutchan wrote:
o we followed the rules until the deadlines got too near, when we were told to revert to our normal mode of working, and get the job done.
That's funny. You were less agile with Agile, but more agile without it. :rolleyes:
raddevus wrote:
You were less agile with Agile, but more agile without it.
What this highlights is that whenever there is a Hot New Topic in town, it takes on multiple meanings: 1. The original meaning, which was usually a bottom-up, emerged kind of way in which developers, through trial and error, came up with a fruitful way-of-work that was a natural fit to them. In this case it was "agile" (no capital used), agile, as in, agility, flexible, to-the-point, and additionally to that, a team where members would operate in mutual trust and a shared understanding of the job at hand which turned out to be pretty darn effective. 2. The way it was landed into the belief system of a management party (colloquially referred to as "the boss"). This is no longer a first-hand experience and loses its initial authenticity and it much depends on a kind-of self-discipline exerted by the aforementioned manager, in how authentically and truthfully they process whatever information comes to them. Now, it so happens that the position of manager is a major attraction to those individuals who have a combination of, say, being verbally apt, but factually feeble, and shall we say, gullible, or sometimes, just short-sighted. It's not hard to imagine how a fad can grow out of proportion in such hands.
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Agile has been praised in the IT world almost as a religious cult; and a cult it is. Those managers who buy into this IT kindergarten principle have created an increase in IT costs that wouldn't make sense to those who see it for what is it - a huge time waster that can be replaced by being accountable for your work. Furthermore, paired programming has certainly been curtailed because of the push to work from home. Yes, virtual meetings can allow the process to take place, but now in a more cumbersome way. I say this because I watched a company I worked for go from getting praises and glory emails from the business partners to silence, crickets. Business meetings that turned into an hour long dead silence, or worse, many that did not even show up, or those attended became much more muted or even silenced; afraid to push back on the nonsense of it all. We went from cubes to cubified areas, to picnic tables where noisy phone conversations, casual chatter, and people shuffling around the room, reduced concentration to a trickle. With the meeting schedules, you are lucky if you get 2-3 days of work done a week. Multiply this times the number of days for the project to complete and you get into a real problem of proving that the expense is truly worth the time. I won't even get into the paired programming philosophy, where you have just doubled the cost of development on an on-going basis. Projects that took several months to complete now take a year or more. Anyone with any common sense simply cannot justify the added time and expense that is supposed to be offset by the claim to reduce scope creep and code errors. IT groups who push back and slam the door on businesses who attempt to add additional functionality many times end up losing in the end as being inflexible. Agile preachers will produce data and charts pointing to how you will really save time by suffering through all this. Large sessions are put on by Agile evangelists praising the Agile gods for giving us this process. This is especially true of projects where only 1 or 2 people work on it. While I would admit that the IT groups in a project that requires more than 3 people need to have meetings to make sure everyone is on point, it does not need a full blown carnival of meetings and daily stand-ups to accomplish this.
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I never got into the pair programming thing, but I just had a small epiphany. Do PCs work with two keyboards? A keyboard and mouse is probably the most peculiar thing about a developer (one of the reasons why I hate new laptops - getting used to the keyboard). I just have this vision of two developers beating each other with keyboards.
Charlie Gilley “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759 Has never been more appropriate.
charlieg wrote:
Do PCs work with two keyboards?
Yes, and 2 mouses as well. I even used dual mouse for a game...
GCS d--(d-) s-/++ a C++++ U+++ P- L+@ E-- W++ N+ o+ K- w+++ O? M-- V? PS+ PE- Y+ PGP t+ 5? X R+++ tv-- b+(+++) DI+++ D++ G e++ h--- r+++ y+++* Weapons extension: ma- k++ F+2 X
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lol. You'll just confuse them. Back to the lab with you. I've worked with a couple of people with really high intelligence and passion (over the years). Nothing wrong with the rest of us or you, but some of you are just in your own little orbit. I made sure to send food to engineering from time to time. *Always* got my bug fixed.
Charlie Gilley “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759 Has never been more appropriate.
Well, to be fair I'm nursing a Cluster-A condition and so I am quite mad. That sort of comes with its own orbit. :)
Real programmers use butterflies
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Agile has been praised in the IT world almost as a religious cult; and a cult it is. Those managers who buy into this IT kindergarten principle have created an increase in IT costs that wouldn't make sense to those who see it for what is it - a huge time waster that can be replaced by being accountable for your work. Furthermore, paired programming has certainly been curtailed because of the push to work from home. Yes, virtual meetings can allow the process to take place, but now in a more cumbersome way. I say this because I watched a company I worked for go from getting praises and glory emails from the business partners to silence, crickets. Business meetings that turned into an hour long dead silence, or worse, many that did not even show up, or those attended became much more muted or even silenced; afraid to push back on the nonsense of it all. We went from cubes to cubified areas, to picnic tables where noisy phone conversations, casual chatter, and people shuffling around the room, reduced concentration to a trickle. With the meeting schedules, you are lucky if you get 2-3 days of work done a week. Multiply this times the number of days for the project to complete and you get into a real problem of proving that the expense is truly worth the time. I won't even get into the paired programming philosophy, where you have just doubled the cost of development on an on-going basis. Projects that took several months to complete now take a year or more. Anyone with any common sense simply cannot justify the added time and expense that is supposed to be offset by the claim to reduce scope creep and code errors. IT groups who push back and slam the door on businesses who attempt to add additional functionality many times end up losing in the end as being inflexible. Agile preachers will produce data and charts pointing to how you will really save time by suffering through all this. Large sessions are put on by Agile evangelists praising the Agile gods for giving us this process. This is especially true of projects where only 1 or 2 people work on it. While I would admit that the IT groups in a project that requires more than 3 people need to have meetings to make sure everyone is on point, it does not need a full blown carnival of meetings and daily stand-ups to accomplish this.
Someone correct me if I am wrong, wait - I'm in the lounge, that happens naturally here.... My perception, and it's been a few years that the roots of agile come from extreme programming (there is a great book somewhere here, maybe my attic) which with the exception of pair programming, opened my eyes to some serious issues in our industry. At the time, I was a manager of a DB development team. After I read this book, my conclusion was we're doing this wrong. This is where Agile just made things way too complex for me. KISS is better for project management - hence I understand the OP's rant. Nuggets and epiphanies I pulled from this book:
- Customers set features. Customers won't know exactly what they want until you put something in front of them. Customers lie. They think they know what they want. Beware.
- The requirements / features will change. Stop your bitching. You best have a management model to deal with it. I've listened to developers complain for 40 years about changing requirements. It's normal. I think agile addresses this with gold plated story boards, etc. I don't know. Just recognizing the facts that customers do not know what they want and things will change is the first step in recovery.
- Customers do not do estimates. The people doing the work do. Again, over many years I have seen really smart people go green and puke having to come up with estimates. Software and systems development is hard. The people doing this work (not customers, PMs, management) are the ones that should be estimating. What I have seen again and again is a developer coming up with an estimate, it's too long, and some individual whacking it by half or more to meet some artificial schedule. The developers never learn how to properly estimate in this environment, so the entire system is set up to fail.
I actually consult with a well managed company. I truly mean that. Even so, they make these same mistakes. The only way customers are allowed to change the schedule is to change the priority of the features they want. They are actually starting to understand this. Even so, how many of us have been asked, "How long will this take?" with no requirements, no feature list, no h/w spec, etc?
This gets back to estimates. I've seen estimates get whacked to meet artificial delivery times (usually there is a trade show involved :)) and then listen to PMs and management complain bitterly that "the development team missed their scheduled commitments"
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charlieg wrote:
Do PCs work with two keyboards?
Yes, and 2 mouses as well. I even used dual mouse for a game...
GCS d--(d-) s-/++ a C++++ U+++ P- L+@ E-- W++ N+ o+ K- w+++ O? M-- V? PS+ PE- Y+ PGP t+ 5? X R+++ tv-- b+(+++) DI+++ D++ G e++ h--- r+++ y+++* Weapons extension: ma- k++ F+2 X
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Nearly half of what I read in your post has nothing to do with Agile. I'm not an Agile evangelist either - I think a waterfall/agile blend works best. At least for our group.
Interesting. https://codeproject.global.ssl.fastly.net/script/Forums/Images/smiley\_confused.gif Can you be specific about the half?
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Video or it didn't happen! :laugh: Seriously, details please.
Charlie Gilley “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759 Has never been more appropriate.
LOL no big deal, in Gabriel Knight 3 there is a part of the game where you have to collect fingerprints and it requires a lot of clicking. My game craqshed, I had to redo it again and had no patience, tried using both the plugged mouses (dual boot system and one mouse didn't work on Linux) and I manage to click hyperfast using both hands. I then used it a bunch of other times in some stupid minigames where a crapton of fast clicks were needed to have a slider go up, I forgot the games though. Also I had two keyboards on because my pro gaming wonderful keyboard... doesn't work in BIOS. So I have a basic second one always plugged in.
GCS d--(d-) s-/++ a C++++ U+++ P- L+@ E-- W++ N+ o+ K- w+++ O? M-- V? PS+ PE- Y+ PGP t+ 5? X R+++ tv-- b+(+++) DI+++ D++ G e++ h--- r+++ y+++* Weapons extension: ma- k++ F+2 X
