Slashdot Mirror
New Analyst Report Calls Agile a Scam, Says It's An Easy Out For Lazy Devs
msmoriarty writes "We recently got a copy of a new Voke analyst report on Agile, and the firm basically blasts the movement from top to bottom. Some highlights: 'The Agile movement is designed to sell services. ... Out of over 200 survey participants, we received only four detailed comments describing success with Agile.' 'Survey participants report that developers use the guise of Agile to avoid planning and to avoid creating documentation required for future maintenance. ... Be aware that the Agile movement might very well just be either a developer rebellion against unwanted tasks and schedules or just an opportunity to sell Agile services including certification and training.' So did the analysts just talk to the wrong 200 people?"
Beware of hucksters selling a system that will give you everything you dream of, and fast and cheap to boot.
And be even more wary of those who promise a way to outsource everything on the cheap without taking any hit on quality.
There is no secret formula. It takes hard work, time, and skill to produce quality work. That's the only trick.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
I'd never heard of Voke before today. What is this company? What credentials do their analysts have, that we should care what they say? (I don't mean academic credentials, I mean proven real-world success.) What are they trying to sell?
There needs to be more skepticism about statements coming from random "consultants", think tanks, etc.
in any field: the early adopter are intelligent, motivated people who know what they're doing and understand how the new method is supposed to work. Later adopters are mediocre hacks who don't perform well to start with, and are probably looking for a way to obfuscate their lack of skill and motivation, or, at best, don't get how the new method is supposed to work.
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
Is a way for managers to tell other managers that the features that no one really cares about will be delivered by a date that no one believes in.
Fugue for Aaron Swartz
In my experience, agile is not about lazy developers not wanting to do the boring work, it's about the business owners and project managers wanting to force unrealistic deadlines on projects such that there is no time for those tasks because of the tight deadlines and quick release cycles. It is rare that they allow the principle that you deliver what you can by the release date, but rather they want everything they asked for and the devs need to make it happen.
Maybe, maybe not. If the requirements really are constantly changing, Agile poses a very real risk of never producing a working product. At some point, you have to step back and say, "Okay, we're never going to have a working building if we can't decide whether we're building a house or an office building." At some point, you simply must stop doing the agile stuff to just beat on the project for an arbitrarily long period of time until you have something that is functional for some fixed set of goals, and worry about dealing with the fallout later.
Also, Agile tends to assume that everything can be broken down into subtasks that take only a single iteration to complete. In practice, this is not always the case, particularly with complex software.
Finally, Agile has a tendency to fail in its goal of producing software that is actually usable by its intended consumer. Because the design work is done iteratively, it is very easy to go off on tangents and iterate on some part of the design, while failing to design the whole. This problem can also plague the architecture underneath if you aren't careful.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
I realize I might get flamed for this, but I wanted to say it anyway: I think agile is a complete waste of time. Its micro management wrapped up in a fancy, marketable term.
I've been a senior developer for about 8 years now. Never used Agile, never had a need to. Hire the right people and there is no need for agile.
Ok, my flame suit is on.
If you have a group of talented developers, all they really need to do is programming, motherfucker. (It helps if you read it in Samuel L. Jackson's voice.)
If you reply, do so only to what I explicitly wrote. If I didn't write it, don't assume or infer it.
Yes, no methodology is going to be a magic bullet that turns a loser team into a superstar team. Agile was never intended to do so.
What agile processes attempt to address is the transient nature of requirements. Large, monolithic processes do not respond well in cases where the client doesn't know exactly what they want up front.
The reality is that clients often times add things during the process, and just as often as not, they do not realize that what they said they wanted wasn't really what they wanted. Providing continuous feedback and re-adjustment helps to mitigate this problem.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
I've seen this in practice, it works really bad.
The problem is that "really cool new features" pretty much always win from all but the most annoying bugs.
If you rely on a feature that only a minority uses and that feature is bugridden, a customer-controller priority system will ensure that it'll never get fixed.
Unless they make an exception for bugs (bugs have priority over everything else), it won't work.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
That's one of the problems with these self-reported "Agile" failures - sure, it borders on a no true Scotsman argument, but if you're "doing agile" with five or six week "sprints", hour-long sit-down meetings instead of standups, no product manager, no backlog, no continuous integration - then can you really say that agile methodologies failed?
What really happened was you were trying to do waterfall faster, which just doesn't work. It's like saying baseball doesn't work because you made a few "tweaks".
Oh, I don't know - given N methodologies of approximately equal effectiveness, it seems to me the one that the workers find most enjoyable/rewarding is highly preferable as it will allow you attract better people and/or pay them less.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Agile works, as long as everyone involved has the balls to stand up for their own part of the process. If the client requests a feature that requires a big chunk of code to be rewritten / refactored, you just have to make sure you're upfront about it, and make it clear of how much effort and time will be required in the process.
The basic thing to keep in mind if that your boss, or the client don't trust your effort / time estimations, agile won't work.
And as a final note: the way to make sure you can trust someone is to hire the right people - have a good screening process when you hire.
diegoT
I've come to the decision that good up-front design is important at an architectural level - get a good, well though out "skeleton" in place and you can flesh it out all higgledy-piggledy while being confident that any major rewrites will be of a limited scope. Overall code and data structure, APIs between large modules, that sort of thing. Time spent on quality large-scale design up front tends to pay for itself many times over in the long haul since you can make sweeping changes at low cost. On the other hand any halfway-decent programmer is also at least an adequate designer - when you start designing the details of every module or function up front you're probably just wasting a lot of time, and it sucks all the creative joy out of actually programming. What fun is writing code when the only room for creativity is minor implementation details? If your design is detailed enough to be read as extra-high-level pseudo-code all that's left is the tedium of actually writing the corresponding code, and you've demoted your programmers to the position of sentient pre-compiler.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
I don't think the report is even addressing whether Agile *can* be used effectively nor not. Its scope seems to be whether it *is* being effective or not for companies, and the answer they present is that it isn't. Whether or not there is a One True Agile that really does work isn't the point; that doesn't matter if people can't figure out how to adopt the approach for their own work (or with consulting help in implementing process, which is also being commented on). You can't prove a software development approach works by presenting examples of it working; the amount of variation among development teams means you could have just been working with a good one. The reason companies try to adopt methologies is to try and get useful work out of *any* development team. A really good software process should work as a filter, only letting things of good quality through as output.
Now, I would turn that conversation not toward Agile--it's no better or worse than the alternatives--and instead ask "is there any process that gets good software even from bad developers?" That's what managers want, and every new softtware development approach that comes along includes some people who claim such magic exists in the process that this will happen. The alternative--accepting there is no silver bullet and focusing on how to get good developers working productively instead--that idea is just fundamentally repugnant to many businesses.