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Ask Slashdot: Have You Experienced Fear Driven Development?
nerdyalien writes: A few years back, I worked for a large-scale web development project in southeast Asia. Despite formally adopting Agile/Scrum, development was driven based on fear imposed by managers. Scott Hanselman defines Fear-Driven-Development as having three parts. 1) Organizational fear has "worried about making mistakes, breaking the build, or causing bugs that the organization increases focus on making paper, creating excessive process, and effectively standing in the way of writing code." 2) There's also fear of changing code, which comes from a complex, poorly-understood, or unmaintainable codebase. 3) The most common one is fear of losing your job, which can lead to developers checking in barely-functioning code and managers committing to a death march rather than admit failure. My project ran four times its initial estimation, and included horrendous 18-hour/day, 6 day/week crunches with pizza dinners. Is FDD here to stay?
Fear driven development leads to anger driven development. Anger driven development leads to hate driven development. Hate driven development leads to buffering (and security defects).
Those who do not learn from commit history are doomed to regress it.
I once worked for a large U.S. based company. They used to make computers but have sold off most of the PC and Server business to Asia. I worked in the Software Division. Fear of loosing your job was routine. This was also true in the hardware end of the company. Fear of breaking the build and the punishments for making anything new or novel were a daily constraint. The company now makes much less software and the only viable revenue stream is a Services business that depends on how hard the older software is to use. They used to pretend to use Agile at my location. We had fake scrums and so on to document the waterfall development that was the real process. I am a happy ex-employee as are thousands of others. The MBA ROI and cost cutting culture along with a Don't Report Bad News Up policy will, I think, kill this and other Western corporations. The only way to create is to fail over and over.
Gee...
I'm Banging My head, trying to think of which company that is...
Here's a conversation I had two years ago, before quitting my job:
Boss: we're doing agile from now on. We'll be using Scrum.
Me: That's great! So we're doing one month sprints with provisional specs, and fine tuning the design as we go? Who are we working with on the user side?
Him: No, you don't understand. They're not going to be involved at that point. They're signing off on a hard spec, then we'll take over and do Scrum with it. You'll understand when you go for the training.
Me: Wait. There's a hard spec?
Him: yes.
Me: and it can't be updated once they sign off on it?
Him: yes. (Beams with pride.)
Me: and we're going to build to their spec, exactly, with no deviations?
Him: yes!
Me: that is not Scrum. It's waterfall.
Him: no, you're wrong. We're using Microsoft Scrum management software, it's Scrum. You'll understand once you've had the training.
Me: I understand now. You keep using thst word, "agile", but I don't think it means what you think it means.
Him: (annoyed stare.)
One of the best laughs of the week was when you managed to talk with a straight face about complicated projects being understood well enough. Most peop0le would have lost it after describing such a made up scenario, but you managed to keep going with what looks like perfect seriousness.
You mean version 9?
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.