Agile is Dead?<\/p>\n
\nAbout 15 years ago I was in a conversation to two women and one brought up her new “cool” shoes. The lady with the shoes said “Do you like these? I got them at Target and they are sooo cool.” We looked down at them — basic Nurse Ratchet shoes with a trendy buckle to make them look motorcycle-bikerish, but basically pigs with lipstick. \u00a0The other lady said: “No, they just look like Target shoes.”<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
I’d been in some meetings to do preliminary estimates for a new project. We had three experienced developer\/architect types and a really nice project manager. Management basically practiced waterfall and used Miscrosoft Project with microtasks entered by PMs, usually from hearsay or breakdown docs, to track tasks and progress. The company had no agile experience other than what developers had dropped into the company — a CI server, a bit of pair programming, and an occassional standup or kanban (with no certified SCM, which I consider a good thing). The PM was telling us the schedule was tight . . .well, as we know, it always is — and said this:<\/p>\n
“It sounds like we need to do Agile.”<\/em><\/p>\n
Dead silence filled the room.<\/strong><\/p>\n
This kind of response is becoming more and more pervasive among developers. We want nothing to do with Agile, Lean or any other process buzzwords because they almost always end up in some sort of time sucking, uncreative, non-contributing hell. We all figure that whatever an organization wants to do to us to get in the way of completing a project we will let them do, because resistance is pointless. We all know management has to report up, we know someone is paying for the project and they expect results; we gladly help in that. It’s up to management to see if their process is in the way though.<\/p>\n
Now I saw a retweet from a “Lean Expert” who said (paraphrase) “I bet my insubordinate troublemakers would beat your developers that do what they are told.” Yeah, really? And what planet does this happen on, where managmeent gives a free hand like that? Hell I don’t even want that, because it’s not my dollar and I expect partnership with my business customers. The idea of Agile has started to represent the old “stop the cowboy developers” of the old days. For instance, I remember a .com I was working on that wouldn’t let us have any other image editing software other than paint. You know the drill — your dev machine is locked down, no admin rights, can’t install anything useful, no trust from the company.<\/p>\n
Agile uncovers itself as that old world practice: stop them. Here’s my news that I drill into everyone around me: the only thing salvageable from Agile are the tools. That’s it. Continuous Integration, testing tools, persistence layers — all the things that make automation better. People aren’t better, process isn’t better … just the tools that allow better precision of a task.<\/p>\n
But the other Agile aspects are lost and have, in my opinion, failed as being useful.<\/p>\n
\n
- Pair programming only works with people who like each other or are evenly matched in project knowledge and skill — quite a balancing act. Estimates are estimates. We are sick of being beaten over the head with estimates-as-deadlines.<\/li>\n
- Estimates are *always* off.<\/li>\n
- Development is *not* a manufacturing process. Modern Agile\/Lean treats it as such. Six Sigma failed at this, ISO 9000 failed at this — why do they keep trying to do this?<\/li>\n
- Velocity only works without deadlines. You can’t know your velocity unless you’ve worked for a bit and collected the stats on a team with the same people. But most projects are the opposite: initial estimates, different people. Velocity isn’t worth gathering most of the time.<\/li>\n
- You still need requirements and business people to get information from.<\/li>\n
- Developers initially would use tools like XPlanner to gather their own stats and get better — for themselves. Now this has to be “managed” by non-technical people.<\/li>\n
- PMing has become a separate career, not a furtherment of development. That’s fine, but these particular types should be kept out of solution building. PM’s are necessary, but the role they play isn’t in the technical part of the project. They are much more important in handling the schedule on behalf of the product owner.<\/li>\n
- I can’t believe scrum mastering is a career now. It’s a remnant of over-credentialization and golden hammer syndrome.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
If I come on your project and you are doing Agile with VersionOne or Greenhopper or what have you, \u00a0I’ll gladly take part; but I’ll just keep silent about the things that have proven un-useful. \u00a0If someone brings up burn-down charts I’ll say “hey that’s grrrrreat.” \u00a0Do your charts: \u00a0burn-down, Gantt, what have you. \u00a0Maybe they’ll help you out. \u00a0Probably not the rest of us though.<\/p>\n
I realize that measurement is important; so I would encourage anyone needing personnel and project measurement to take a cue from the developers approach ask if the tool they are choosing is helping or hurting or just doing nothing — they are, after all, part of the project too.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Agile is Dead? About 15 years ago I was in a conversation to two women and one brought up her new “cool” shoes. The lady with the shoes said “Do you like these? I got them at Target and they are sooo cool.” We looked down at them — basic Nurse Ratchet shoes with a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[14,17],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/10kdev.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1065"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/10kdev.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/10kdev.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/10kdev.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/10kdev.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1065"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/10kdev.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1065\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1074,"href":"http:\/\/10kdev.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1065\/revisions\/1074"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/10kdev.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1065"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/10kdev.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1065"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/10kdev.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1065"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}