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Ask Slashdot: Has Your Team Ever Succumbed To Hype Driven Development? (daftcode.pl)
marekkirejczyk, the VP of Engineering at development shop Daftcode, shares a warning about hype-driven development:
Someone reads a blog post, it's trending on Twitter, and we just came back from a conference where there was a great talk about it. Soon after, the team starts using this new shiny technology (or software architecture design paradigm), but instead of going faster (as promised) and building a better product, they get into trouble. They slow down, get demotivated, have problems delivering the next working version to production.
Describing behind-schedule teams that "just need a few more days to sort it all out," he blames all the hype surrounding React.js, microservices, NoSQL, and that "Test-Driven Development Is Dead" blog post by Ruby on Rails creator David Heinemeier Hansson. ("The list goes on and on... The root of all evil seems to be social media.") Does all this sound familiar to any Slashdot readers? Has your team ever succumbed to hype-driven development?
Describing behind-schedule teams that "just need a few more days to sort it all out," he blames all the hype surrounding React.js, microservices, NoSQL, and that "Test-Driven Development Is Dead" blog post by Ruby on Rails creator David Heinemeier Hansson. ("The list goes on and on... The root of all evil seems to be social media.") Does all this sound familiar to any Slashdot readers? Has your team ever succumbed to hype-driven development?
For some projects and some teams, Agile is the best they can be expected to do. For other types of projects and other types of teams, it's a really horrible idea.
Central to Agile is the proposition that the company is unable or unwilling to figure out what the requirements are before they develop the system. As Yogi Beara said, "if you don't know where you're going, you not get there." On small projects it might not hurt too much to figure it out as you go along, to backtrack and throw away code that has to be replaced. On large projects, and systems that need to integrate with other systems, you REALLY do need to figure out the requirements ahead of time and plan the architecture.
If your team consists solely of programmers of medium competence, Agile may be the best choice. If you have even one excellent systems architect, you're far better off letting therm do their job, planning the system out first. If your team includes junior programmers (or veterans who haven't expanded their skill set over the years), Agile can leave them floundering, going one direction for a few weeks, then another direction for a few weeks, then completely backtracking for a few weeks.
In summary, Agile is sometimes the best choice for your team, and when it is, you've done a poor job of hiring.
Several years ago my Pointy-haired Boss was reading technology articles (bad idea) and caught the "Big Data" bug. It spread to our CTO, CIO and all department heads like wildfire. This led to our Development team being turned into NoSQL zombies who said words like "Hadoop", "Shark", "Spark" in response to any new product requirement. It was a glorious vision of a magical backend system that would take all our data from every platform, that would scale up and out forever, and could be asked any question and give us exactly the results we wanted all instantly. The fact no one in the entire company had ever used any of the technology before or the fact we didn't even have any Java experience to setup even the base Hadoop installation were just minor points not worth discussing. I would like to say I was the lone dissenting voice, well I was and said lets just stick to SQL, but even I got caught up in the hype eventually.
18 months later and a sickening amount of man-years wasted and contractor money spent with no usable products or services the conclusion was NoSQL isn't a good fit for our data or platform use case. So they all went back to standard MySQL and completed 90% of the delayed projects in under 4 weeks.
On the plus side management heads did roll. I have a new My Pointy-haired Boss and CTO. However they have now started to drop in the words "Microservices" and "Docker" into all discussions. I can see a new hype-train arriving shortly ...
Central to Agile is the proposition that the company is unable or unwilling to figure out what the requirements are before they develop the system.
The problem is that waterfall is presented as making extreme effort to try figuring it all out up front, while Agile then becomes to the exact opposite where you make no effort and just prioritize what's right in front of your nose. Reality is that you need some flexibility in waterfall projects and some structure in agile projects. In my opinion it's fine as a development method, it's all the people making requirements who don't even try anymore because agile. We're so dynamic, as long as we can spin in place it doesn't matter that we're not going anywhere.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
...has proven itself for five years. The hard part is convincing executives of the five year rule. Often the benefits only appear in narrow niches or under specific conditions, but it takes a while for the industry to learn when and where.
Also, a lot "fads" are not directly technology fads, but rather obsessions. About 2 years ago our CIO became obsessed with SEO - Search Engine Optimization (Google hits, more or less), and so all kinds of silly games were played with our Internet content and CMS's, including mass repetition.
After a while people realized there was too much content to manage and clean up. That CIO moved on and the new CIO is a minimalist. Big change. SEO did nothing but make a mess.
We were suspicious of it all, but there was nothing we could do at the time but go with the flow. At least bullshit = jobs.
Table-ized A.I.