Good Agile — Development Without Deadlines

BigTom writes, "In a recent blog entry Steve Yegge, a developer at Google, writes a fascinating account of life at possibly the coolest development organization in the world. Steve lays out some of the software development practices that make Google work. Go on, say you are not even a little bit jealous. ;-)" From the article:

• Developers can switch teams and/or projects any time they want, no questions asked; just say the word and the movers will show up the next day to put you in your new office with your new team.
• There aren't very many meetings. I'd say an average developer attends perhaps 3 meetings a week.
• Google has a philosophy of not ever telling developers what to work on, and they take it pretty seriously.
• Google tends not to pre-announce. They really do understand that you can't rush good cooking, you can't rush babies out, and you can't rush software development.

Yegge also does a fine job of skewering what the author calls "Bad Agile."

Comments

Must be nice in Candyland

[TopShelf]

One thing that helps Google in this regard is that they are insanely profitable, and their software engineers as described in TFA are really more like product development entrepreneurs, so it's easier to set up an incentive-based program like this that puts a huge, juicy carrot in front of the developers to keep them headed in the right direction. I suspect that 99% of the rest of the IT world doesn't have this luxury.

That said, it's a very interesting example to consider. Within the coming months I'll be forming a new application development group, and the mechanisms of determining what we'll be working on and how it will be prioritized are TBD. Good food for thought, here...

Not true

[Anonymous Coward]

"Developers can switch teams and/or projects any time they want, no questions asked; just say the word and the movers will show up the next day to put you in your new office with your new team."

I work for Google and I can tell you right now that is total horse shit. Google are not so different than my previous employers, Oracle and Microsoft.

If anything, working in Google is worse than Oracle/Microsoft due to the people I work with (brainwashed losers.) They are the type of people who want to join a cult.

besides search/adds?

[RingDev]

Is there any Google app that is truly profitable other than Google Search and Adds?

As you mentioned, with their huge amount of capital, they can afford highly in-efficient project management. I pity the fool who tries to introduce this management style into a smaller organization with budgetary concerns and uncontrollable deadlines. Not that I wouldn't mind working in their environment one bit. Either as a coder, or as a PM.

-Rick