[HN Gopher] Negative developer comments about Agile and Scrum on...
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Negative developer comments about Agile and Scrum on social media
Author : RayFrankenstein
Score : 26 points
Date : 2023-08-14 21:47 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| FpUser wrote:
| I do not hate it (Agile / SCRUM). I just plainly refuse to
| participate in twisted distortion of reality and wet dream of
| imbecile self serving managers (there are actually very good
| managers as well but I am not talking about those). No complaints
| from my clients. I make it a condition - no onsite work and no
| agile for me. Do no care what they do inside. I might have lost
| couple of deals but so far I have no shortage (fingers crossed).
| gustavus wrote:
| I love agile I think the fundamental underlying principle is
| sound. Iterate quickly, be flexible, focus on doing a thing and
| change when it isn't working.
|
| The problem is not and never had been agile. It is the "agile"
| industry which spun up around it to bilk clueless management, out
| of money and give Execs reasons to transfer a couple thousand
| quid to their buddies for agile consulting services.
|
| Agile is brilliant precisely because it is so concise and clear
| and there isn't that much more beyond the manifesto to
| understand.
|
| Unfortunately it was mangled, tortured and twisted into a
| Frankenstinian nightmare that made everyone suffer. The good news
| is that right around the time everyone was getting wise to the
| fact that the entire agile industry was built on sand DevOps
| popped up to be the new buzzword of which the kingdom of jargon
| will be grown out of. And the cycle continues.
| graypegg wrote:
| The manifesto is concise, but I wouldn't call it clear. I think
| that's why "agility coaches" have their niche.
|
| You can't really teach beliefs, which is why it's formatted
| like an agreement. Everyone is supposed to at least think they
| share these ideals, and make choices that align with those
| beliefs. But that's much too introspective to be marketable as
| meta-work, so people have started reading between the lines to
| explain away specific meetings or processes. Because "agile" as
| a concept is so unclear, it's easy to expand on, creating the
| weird Frankenstein situation you're talking about.
| dylan604 wrote:
| I've been in too many situations where agile was touted, but it
| was just something to cover up the lack of longer term
| planning. Treating everything like a fire and running about
| being agile is also a sign of bad leadership
| madeofpalk wrote:
| The frustrating thing about "I Hate Agile" is that... there's no
| such thing as "The Agile". I was once talking to a developer who
| told me they hate "Agile" because how they have to stay later and
| work more hours. They also thought "Agile" meant a ping pong
| table. I was speechless.
|
| Any team that is dogmatic in how they develop software will
| always have a difficult time.
|
| Teams should ask what problem they're trying to solve, and
| whether "agile" has some tools they could try to improve their
| problems.
| tamimio wrote:
| As someone who worked both as a developer/engineer and as a
| project manager, the simple answer is a lot of novice (polit word
| for idiot) PMs choose agile and try to force it on a team just
| because they heard X famous company applied it or their previous
| company applied it in some project and worked, but at the end of
| the day, it is just a tool like any tool you use, it might work
| in some specific occasion, but definitely it is not the best for
| everything, and you as a PM who's getting paid for that specific
| task, it's your responsibility to know this, customize it or even
| create a new approach to achieve the end goal. I have seen and
| heard so much horror stories of how some PMs are abusing it, or
| misuse it due to lack of training and knowledge, I remember a
| friend once said they had a meeting to discuss meetings.. or when
| some PM try to apply scrum for some niche engineering project
| with small team where scrum assumes everyone in the team can do
| the same task, and your engineers have completely different
| disciplines to start with, list goes on.
| dpe82 wrote:
| This strikes me as the most important point: "The only thing
| consistent about Agile is that everyone is doing it wrong."--fwio
|
| If nobody can do it right then it doesn't matter if the
| methodology produces utopia when applied correctly; nobody will
| ever get there.
| readthenotes1 wrote:
| I wonder if the same hate to Agile applies to CI?
|
| One of the best things about CI was knowing who would deliver and
| who wouldn't and who knew their stuff was so important they could
| break everyone else's.
|
| I just see the agile management processes as an attempt to get
| the same insight outside of the code base.
| poutinepapi wrote:
| I wonder if this is the result with tech's obsession with
| certificates. There was a time circa 2009-2014 when everyone and
| their mum were Scrum masters.
|
| And a lot of those comments sound like whoever is handling
| project management uses Agile as a dogma rather than a toolbox to
| be modified as needed.
|
| I don't think I've ever come across a project that uses "pure"
| agile. It'd be pretty insane. Right now I use a mixed approach
| that uses: * Requirements * User stories * Use cases(IBM style) *
| Planning Poker * UML * Sprints(Both 1 week and 4 week sprints) *
| Burn-Down charts And a bunch other I'm probably forgetting.
|
| It also sounds like their project managers aren't actually
| managing them, but rather delegating the management to their
| developers.
|
| I used to have a producer that said that every second an engineer
| wasted faffing about in JIRA was a second not spent solving an
| issue, so he tried to automate reporting as much as possible and
| wanted us to only raise an alarm if something didn't go as
| planned.
|
| I quite liked this approach and I'm planning on using a modified
| version for a future project, so I guess I'll soon find out if it
| works :D
| ProfMeowsworth wrote:
| I'd be interested to see a proposal for an alternative and better
| way of working.
| Jemm wrote:
| I hate that Agile and Scrum are being used as yet another layer
| of management that abstracts the people doing the work from the
| resources they need.
|
| Maybe in a properly run shop it works and I have just had poor
| luck.
| graypegg wrote:
| It should be bringing you closer to the work. The only "agile"
| (adjective) way of working I have seen work is where people
| whole-heartedly believe in the principles listed here:
| https://agilemanifesto.org/principles.html
|
| If people actually believe that, you should be MORE aware of
| customer needs, what the market your company exists within is
| doing, and why things have to be done.
|
| It's not great if you don't want to have to worry about outside
| factors like that, but then you need to expect the many extra
| managerial and planning layers that come with old school
| factory management.
| palata wrote:
| IMHO, the problem is that we as an industry don't seem to accept
| that tasks estimates are wrong most of the time. Because it's
| hard to estimate, and because managers don't believe developers.
| Also managers have an incentive to give unreasonable deadlines to
| developers (developers under pressure are admittedly faster, but
| not necessarily making a good job), and developers have an
| incentive to write quick hacks to make their managers happy.
|
| There are methods that work and that don't require
| institutionalized estimation-bullshit. For instance:
|
| - You write a mobile app for a customer. Discuss the requirement
| with them, say what is "easy" and what is "much harder than they
| imagine" (they probably don't want that, it's orders of
| magnitudes more expensive than they expect). Then work hard on
| limiting the scope of the project with the customer and start
| working. Meet every 2 weeks with the customer, show the progress
| and get paid. Decide the next step with the customer and go for
| another 2 weeks. This is the closest I can imagine to the typical
| Agile cults, except that it doesn't involve estimation dances
| ("Fibonacci points or T-shirt sizes?") and all the "velocity"
| crap.
|
| - You need to write bigger software than a small app. In that
| case, just build it slowly, and start selling it when it is ready
| instead of selling promises based on estimates (again: estimates
| are wrong). Estimates here lead to over-promising, then there is
| no need to design the software properly, everyone makes hacks and
| rushes and makes a bad job.
| ChicagoDave wrote:
| Since I started involving myself in more complex application
| modernization projects, I lean towards Domain-Driven Design.
|
| DDD and agile don't like each other much at all until you're in
| the implementation side of software engineering. The discovery
| and modeling activities are very hard to quantify so reporting
| tasks and progress is very difficult.
|
| So the challenge is to get managers to be flexible in how they
| manage aspects of application modernization.
| bdangubic wrote:
| The only "process" that works in our industry is "hire the right
| people and get the F out of the way." everything is bs.
|
| live and work long enough in this industry and you'll go through
| myriad of "processes" and "manifestos" and other bs all created
| to hire tens of thousands of incompetent people to tell 100's of
| thousands of (mostly) incompetent people how they should do their
| work
| voz_ wrote:
| Agile and scrum are processes invented by the out of touch,
| mandated by the ignorant, to micromanage the unmotivated.
| koalacola wrote:
| Forgive my ignorance, but is this a blog post on Github?
| dsr_ wrote:
| I talked to someone less than a week ago who works at a very
| large software company: their products are huge monoliths that
| take days to build, where the customers need to plan their
| upgrades months ahead of time because they can't afford downtime.
| Everything has to be documented and incorporated into the
| manuals, and there are five or six layers of people between any
| possible users and the developers. They need to support seven or
| eight versions at any given point in time.
|
| They work in fixed-length sprints with daily standups. They
| assign bugs to specific people who then have to write user
| stories about the bugs before beginning work on them. Product
| features are planned out quarters in advance.
|
| You know, Agile.
| waffletower wrote:
| No one is willing to admit here that they too hate Agile for fear
| of reprisal from current and/or future employers.
| madeofpalk wrote:
| Honestly every post mentioning "Agile" is always full of people
| saying how much they hate it for whatever reason.
| hexo wrote:
| I hate it. No regrets. It is good for newbies only. Even
| seniors new to project can benefit from it for like 2 days at
| most.
| graypegg wrote:
| A lot of the quotes are from hacker news actually. They even
| link back to each comment.
| palata wrote:
| This makes sense to me:
| https://agilemanifesto.org/principles.html
|
| Everything else in the "agile" cult is bullshit.
| jiggawatts wrote:
| I once had a project where I regularly sat with the end-users
| of my software. I'd look over their shoulders and observe where
| they were losing time to something I could automate away.
|
| They were happy with the result. I was happy I could act as a
| force multiplier for an entire team.
|
| That's what Agile is supposed to be.
|
| Everything else is some weird cult.
|
| Like... Jesus just told everyone to treat each other the way
| they themselves would like to be treated. The specific dress
| code of the bishops in the Vatican? That's _not_ the message.
| But I guarantee you that the dress code is enforced by some
| busybody.
| palata wrote:
| > That's what Agile is supposed to be.
|
| But then does it have to be called "Agile", or can we keep
| the older "common sense"?
|
| I tend to think that at university, we were pretty good at
| self-organizing for group projects. We had to be efficient
| because of deadlines, and it worked well.
|
| Then I joined a company, where some people (usually not the
| best developers, obviously) felt good telling everybody else
| how they should work. Introducing processes, reading all
| sorts of agile books, copying Spotify's processes, using the
| management tools they saw in a Netflix blog. Those were the
| managers.
|
| And every time I ask a manager: "so, this process... is it to
| make _you_ more productive, or is it meant to make _me_
| productive? ", they say "it is making you more productive".
| Why would they believe me when I say it does not? Their job
| depends on it.
| graypegg wrote:
| Yeah I think I'm in the same boat as you.
|
| Anyone I've had to work with who has "Agile" in their title has
| at best done nothing, and at worst slowed everyone to a a
| crawl.
|
| The base ideas though, I totally agree with.
|
| I think things fall apart (ironically) when "agile coaches" put
| processes before individuals.
| lapcat wrote:
| > This makes sense to me:
| https://agilemanifesto.org/principles.html
|
| > Everything else in the "agile" cult is bullshit.
|
| IMO the fundamental problem with the manifesto is the question,
| who is the customer? "Our highest priority is to satisfy the
| customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable
| software."
|
| _My_ customers don 't want "early and continuous delivery". I
| hate App Store apps that release new versions every week with
| cutesy uniformative release notes like "We've improved the
| software _for you_ ". That's bullshit.
|
| The Agile Manifesto seems designed for contractors or for wage-
| slaves to middle-managers. Replace "the customer" with "the end
| user" and it doesn't sound so great anymore. But nobody seems
| to care about the users of the software.
| RugnirViking wrote:
| idk ive worked in both systems and they have their positives and
| negatives but the overriding factor by a million miles is quality
| of management. nothing works if you have mismatched management
| for the scale of the task & company. Every system works if you
| have the right management.
|
| It's much more important to stick to dogma when you have 200 guys
| that need to coordinate. Anyone overmanaging your team of 6
| sticking tightly to agile is wrong. But similarly doing cowboy
| type anything goes "requirements are a suggestion" type stuff
| causes disasters on the regular at larger companies resulting in
| knots that are far too large to untie
| rr808 wrote:
| "Agile is dead" (now that it was hijacked by managers) from Dave
| Thomas, one of the guys who wrote it.
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a-BOSpxYJ9M
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