Slashdot Mirror
Playing Politics With Agile Projects (cio.com)
A harsh perspective on agile software development, shared by Slashdot reader itwbennett: Politicians would be utter failures as agile project managers, writes David Taber, and for all the reasons you might imagine, but mainly because they wantonly make promises they have no hope or thought of keeping. But then he gets into the political attributes successful project managers need. And that's where things get interesting because, while he points out that agile was 'conceived of as a way of bypassing bureaucracy and internal politics,' the attributes he says are required for success are pretty much the worst of the political behavior we've all witnessed in our organizations.
For example, "A key success factor for agile projects is the ability for every team member to talk expectations down at every possible juncture. Agile should inherently involve frequent 1:1 contact with users: use that time to lower expectations! Without this habit, the inevitable scope creep and the impulse to believe "of course the system will do X for me" will get you."
His submission ends with this question. "Is it any wonder why users hate agile?"
For example, "A key success factor for agile projects is the ability for every team member to talk expectations down at every possible juncture. Agile should inherently involve frequent 1:1 contact with users: use that time to lower expectations! Without this habit, the inevitable scope creep and the impulse to believe "of course the system will do X for me" will get you."
His submission ends with this question. "Is it any wonder why users hate agile?"
My problem with Agile is the stand up meetings. I have been at places where they go for 2-3 hours a day, with people doing little each day, and using "Wah, I'm blocked" as a way to blamestorm and shift responsibilities to other parties. I could be doing a -lot- more with my time than hearing some other person talk about their stuff, what they did today in detail, down to how many times the HANA developer shook her weewee in the restroom, what their aspirations are tomorrow, and "what have you done tomorrow" questioning.
With 0 productivity getting done during a stand up meeting, at least 25-35% of the the day is shot to hell in the finger pointing session.
I absolutely agree that the Agile theory that you don't find out the requirements before you begin work is stupid.
So I'm going to AC this one... at work we're doing a project where 2.5 years out of 3 has been dicking around with the spec. Or rather creating lots of wordy documents, fancy presentations, flowcharts and magic boxes that supposedly solve problems. No developers were involved, because we were not in the development phase. The first month of the "development" project I spent ripping the spec apart saying we need design choices, not vague descriptions of many ways to accomplish the same thing like data acquisition, push vs pull, replication vs xml messages, nothing was decided. Just a magic box that would get the data from them to us, to take one example.
We're supposedly "agilish" but the first four sprints have already been planned by our project manager and only the last one delivers a product, it's not agile. It's just really, really bad waterfall. I can assure you that if we 2+ years ago just got permission to start doing anything, we'd within a few months have prototyped up a few more solutions and made way more decisions based on facts and feasibility instead of now when the whole thing is based on conjecture - by people who won't be doing the coding. Best part? On Monday I'm going to announce my bits on the first sprint will be delayed, the ones still refining the spec doesn't have the list of fields we'll so there's no message format so I can't finish the receiving code. Which means we won't receive data as expected so the whole plan will fall apart.
I'm not saying Agile would solve all our problems, because there's no much dysfunction here... but a waterfall project can deliver fuck all in 3 years and that's okay. If an Agile project doesn't deliver anything that can be considered Done, even on a tiny fraction of the functionality in 3 months, I'd call it a failure. And then we could at least fail early, before all the architects and visionaries and early project managers have moved on to create the next disaster leaving us with the clean-up on isle we're-so-screwed. And my project manager is of course trying to make shit roll downhill by pushing us to make something of this mess because we're going to fail, the only question is how badly.