7 ms·

Agile Is a Tainted Term

76 points by peterkonsz 3y ago

quectophoton 3y ago
The closest I've found to agile is when a team says they use "extreme programming", but I still find it funny that even EP goes against the "Individuals and interactions over processes and tools", or at least walks a tightrope on whether it's a process or not.
- The_Colonel 3y ago
  I see people kind of assuming that this agile principle implies there should be no process at all. Do you make that assumption or where does the perceived contradiction come from?
  - SideburnsOfDoom 3y ago
    There is a human tendency for absolutes, black and white, binary, either-or thinking, and it seems to manifest no matter what. If this is happening here, this is a good example, as the front page of the Agile manifesto is laconically short, 10 lines of text ( https://agilemanifesto.org/ https://agilemanifesto.org/ ) And includes the repeated formulation "x over y" - NB this is not "x, instead of y", not "x, not y" And then clarifies with "That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more." If people can read an absolute from that, then they can read it anywhere.
    - quectophoton 3y ago
      Yeah, I only remembered the four main lines and was, uh, "pattern matching" with other language stuff. More or less same mistake as (unfortunately) conflating "I don't like X" with "I dislike X", which also falls into into the black-and-white tendency you mentioned.
  - quectophoton 3y ago
    Now that you point this out, I was actually making that assumption yes. My bad. In my defense, I forgot about the fine print on the agile manifesto website.
SPBS 3y ago
I wish more people understood this. Nobody should be arguing for Agile anymore. Don't say "no, but-" or "that is not what the Manifesto says-" because you're only strengthening the case for Agile as propagated by the fraudmasters simply by virtue of it sharing the same name as the thing you're arguing for. Leave the term behind, find something else.
- GauntletWizard 3y ago
  The problem is that it's a neverending treadmill of naming if you do that. Every good idea will be taken over by fraudsters. A lot of good ideas are already tainted by this, and while you have to pick your battles, there's something to be said for standing your ground on naming.
  - grugagag 3y ago
    Don’t name it, just do. As soon as you name it and becomes a bit known fraudsters come, take the name and begin the grift
    - lucumo 3y ago
      This has been my favourite approach as well. Once you label something, you get discussions about what is and isn't the label. Once you label something, the debate on semantics starts and the discussion of the problem stops. At the same time, unnamed things exist in a state where you can't even think about them without thinking about what it really is. You don't have a word for it, so you have to use the description. And that makes it easier to change too, if it doesn't work or when circumstances change.
  - BLKNSLVR 3y ago
    > The problem is that it's a neverending treadmill of naming if you do that. OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) have replaced KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) due to some kind of contrived negative connotation that became associated with KPIs over time But they're the exact same thing. Something else will replace OKR in a few years so that management can sound as if they're more in tune with the sensitivities of their employees and, yes, OKRs were a bit on the nose, so luckily we've got FCKs now, they're modern and progressive, like us! How many FCKs do you give?
chris_nielsen 3y ago
Page wont load for me. BUT, this title is the first sensible thing I’ve heard someone say about Agile in 10 years. I just don’t use the word Agile. Too many people like it for the wrong reasons, or hate it for the wrong reasons. Everyone has a different understanding of it. It’s just not useful. If I say “let’s use Agile” it’s just going to lead to arguments and misunderstandings. Id always rather be more specific about which Agile idea I think will be useful. E.g. “let’s build a prototype before we waste time planning too much detail” or “lets get something built and released so we can learn more about what our customers want” etc.
- bazil376 3y ago
  Your last paragraph is basically the conclusion of the article. “Agile” is so loaded it’s not worth using
i_have_an_idea 3y ago
Agile/Scrum is one of those things that are impossible to criticize. You can come up with a well-reasoned critique of Agile and there's always some Agile evangelist that pops up to tell you that you're not doing "real agile" and, therefore, your experience is invalid. At the same time, I have now done software engineering for over a decade, in many roles and teams, and I have never seen Agile or Scrum to lead to the development of a good piece of software. I guess we were using it wrong.
- midasz 3y ago
  What do you use that does lead to a good piece of software?
  - SideburnsOfDoom 3y ago
    Individuals and interactions, over processes and tools.
  - slivanes 3y ago
    By focusing on the product rather than the process.
    - midasz 3y ago
      How does that work? So you've already went through the steps of figuring out a process, or do you just pick one and stick with it - accepting shitty parts? What's the process?
      - oneshtein 3y ago
        You should start with the developing of the product as is happens, then use Continuous Improvement process to improve the development process. You can use SCRUM/Kanban/SaFE/LeSS, hybrid or other Agile methodology, or no process at all, but it will not help when people are not trained to be proper part of the process. For example, a PM may replace SCRUM meeting with a status meeting, because it makes his job easier, while PM or other M should not attend a SCRUM meeting at all, unless called in by engineers. The proper moment for interaction between PM and engineer are beginning/end of a ticket, sprint review, and sprint planning.
SideburnsOfDoom 3y ago
Yes. What I have said before, for the same reasons, is that when the average office that says "we do the Agile", what they mean is that they have top-down, upfront planned micromanagement via tools such as Jira. * This has nothing in common with the values of the Agile Manifesto. In fact it's more like the opposite of them. * I hate Jira. Jira is not the cause of the problem. People's desire for a tool like that is cause of Jira. Kill Jira, and it would soon be replaced with something much the same.
- misnome 3y ago
  We’re going to be officially moving to Agile! Soon. By which I mean the project planning committee has created a multi-hundred page document with precise BPM-style workflow charts (based on Jira, obviously), and non-technical managers have started being sent on multi-day training courses to learn how to follow them. It’s going to be a shitshow!
  - SideburnsOfDoom 3y ago
    > the project planning committee has created a multi-hundred page document with precise workflow charts ... It’s going to be a shitshow! A Waterfall of effluent, spilling from the end of the process pipe, branded "Agile!" (TM, sponsored by Atlassian). What are you moving from ?
KevinMS 3y ago
Dave Thomas has a talk about this Agile is Dead https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a-BOSpxYJ9M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a-BOSpxYJ9M To oversimplify it, he says "agile" has become a noun when it was always meant to be an adjective. In other words, if you are "doing" agile, you aren't really being agile.
4pkjai 3y ago
A sales guy told me his team does Agile. I asked him what he meant. “We have don’t have assigned desks”.
Tabular-Iceberg 3y ago
Another problem is that the Agile OGs keep overselling their methodology. They keep saying that waterfall just doesn't work, yet almost all commercially successful (and unsuccessful) software is produced that way, whether they claim to use Agile or not. Would it be better if they used "real Agile"? Of course! But you only ever have to be just good enough.
benbruscella 3y ago
http://programming-motherfucker.com/ http://programming-motherfucker.com/
- viraptor 3y ago
  I wish that was a joke, but it's Zed so... No, you can't replace customer collaboration with more programming. When you're in a programming hole of misunderstood solutions, you can't fix that by doing more programming. When things keep changing without good reasons, you can't fix that by doing more programming, etc.
  - bruce343434 3y ago
    When things keep changing without good reasons, you - tell the client to get their shit together - fire the client - walk away
  - Tabular-Iceberg 3y ago
    He's not saying replacing customer collaboration with programming. He's saying replace bleeding clients dry under the pretense of customer collaboration with programming.
    - viraptor 3y ago
      He's saying the customer collaboration is just a con for bleeding clients dry and he should just do programming. I read "just" as only/instead in this case.
      - Tabular-Iceberg 3y ago
        As presently practiced they all indeed are cons for bleeding clients dry. I haven't met Zed, but I can't imagine he thinks he can read minds, he must ask at some point what the customer wants to get out of the project. But the endless bikeshedding meetings and piles of useless UML diagrams and other documents is indeed just a scam. The most absurd thing of it all is that even in-house development organizations behave the exact same way, despite having the exact opposite incentives.
sime2009 3y ago
The rarely discussed cornerstone of Agile is trusting the team and letting them organise themselves. For most organisation this represents a huge internal change in power structure. The Agile industrial complex can't really sell a message to their customers (i.e. managers) that the development teams should have the power and run themselves how they feel fit. This message amounts to "if this works, we can fire the managers". Not a popular message for managers. So, instead of building on an agile foundation, companies just add some story points and funny sounding meetings on top of the old structure and nothing really changes. It is Agile cosplay.
- pitched 3y ago
  I’ll take this a step further too and say that if Agile is being introduced by management, it means they don’t trust their teams to organize themselves. Agile, as sold, can’t actually work in that environment. The battle is already lost.
  - sime2009 3y ago
    That's right. It can't be pushed down from above. The team has to want to do this and take the power. A manager can start work on this kind of culture shift without even saying the word "agile". They need to give their teams more trust and room to govern themselves. i.e. managers need to get out of the way. When a team is open to the idea of Agile or scrum, then the manager could ask the team if they would like training or coaching. But the ground has to be made fertile first.
codex_beta 3y ago
The agile approach is generally academic mumbo jumbo that is rarely effective/efficient in large-scale industrial practice. Coming from an industry where functional safety is paramount, I think the agile approach is rarely appropriate unless you want to effectively waste everyone's valuable time with unnecessary overheads. If the product has already been launched or is at a pre-launch stage AND the team is small and professional enough, it might even work, but then why bother with such processes and roles overheads in the first place! Irrespective of the chosen approach, it’s crucial to systematically elicit requirements, document specifications, and rigorously verify and validate everything. Implementation should ideally be supported by thorough unit tests, and, most importantly, all artifacts must be traceable across different abstraction layers and to the required level of detail.
EchoChamberMan 3y ago
As soon as "agile" became "Agile" with a capital A, the war was lost. "Doing" Agile is missing the point; one must be agile.
koreth1 3y ago
Scrum is the thing that has tainted "agile" in my opinion, because Scrum is so widespread that many people think they're the same thing. Leaving aside the "agile is a philosophy, not a methodology" argument, there are well-defined agile methodologies other than Scrum. I've worked at a couple Kanban shops and, while our dev processes were far from perfect, most of the things people routinely hate about "agile" just didn't come up at all because they're actually Scrum features. If the thing you don't like involves the words "sprint" or "standup," you are complaining about Scrum, not agile.

76 points by peterkonsz 3y ago

The closest I've found to agile is when a team says they use "extreme programming", but I still find it funny that even EP goes against the "Individuals and interactions over processes and tools", or at least walks a tightrope on whether it's a process or not.

The_Colonel 3y ago
I see people kind of assuming that this agile principle implies there should be no process at all. Do you make that assumption or where does the perceived contradiction come from?
- SideburnsOfDoom 3y ago
  There is a human tendency for absolutes, black and white, binary, either-or thinking, and it seems to manifest no matter what. If this is happening here, this is a good example, as the front page of the Agile manifesto is laconically short, 10 lines of text ( https://agilemanifesto.org/ https://agilemanifesto.org/ ) And includes the repeated formulation "x over y" - NB this is not "x, instead of y", not "x, not y" And then clarifies with "That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more." If people can read an absolute from that, then they can read it anywhere.
  - quectophoton 3y ago
    Yeah, I only remembered the four main lines and was, uh, "pattern matching" with other language stuff. More or less same mistake as (unfortunately) conflating "I don't like X" with "I dislike X", which also falls into into the black-and-white tendency you mentioned.
- quectophoton 3y ago
  Now that you point this out, I was actually making that assumption yes. My bad. In my defense, I forgot about the fine print on the agile manifesto website.

SPBS 3y ago

I wish more people understood this. Nobody should be arguing for Agile anymore. Don't say "no, but-" or "that is not what the Manifesto says-" because you're only strengthening the case for Agile as propagated by the fraudmasters simply by virtue of it sharing the same name as the thing you're arguing for. Leave the term behind, find something else.

GauntletWizard 3y ago
The problem is that it's a neverending treadmill of naming if you do that. Every good idea will be taken over by fraudsters. A lot of good ideas are already tainted by this, and while you have to pick your battles, there's something to be said for standing your ground on naming.
- grugagag 3y ago
  Don’t name it, just do. As soon as you name it and becomes a bit known fraudsters come, take the name and begin the grift
  - lucumo 3y ago
    This has been my favourite approach as well. Once you label something, you get discussions about what is and isn't the label. Once you label something, the debate on semantics starts and the discussion of the problem stops. At the same time, unnamed things exist in a state where you can't even think about them without thinking about what it really is. You don't have a word for it, so you have to use the description. And that makes it easier to change too, if it doesn't work or when circumstances change.
- BLKNSLVR 3y ago
  > The problem is that it's a neverending treadmill of naming if you do that. OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) have replaced KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) due to some kind of contrived negative connotation that became associated with KPIs over time But they're the exact same thing. Something else will replace OKR in a few years so that management can sound as if they're more in tune with the sensitivities of their employees and, yes, OKRs were a bit on the nose, so luckily we've got FCKs now, they're modern and progressive, like us! How many FCKs do you give?

chris_nielsen 3y ago

Page wont load for me. BUT, this title is the first sensible thing I’ve heard someone say about Agile in 10 years. I just don’t use the word Agile. Too many people like it for the wrong reasons, or hate it for the wrong reasons. Everyone has a different understanding of it. It’s just not useful. If I say “let’s use Agile” it’s just going to lead to arguments and misunderstandings. Id always rather be more specific about which Agile idea I think will be useful. E.g. “let’s build a prototype before we waste time planning too much detail” or “lets get something built and released so we can learn more about what our customers want” etc.

bazil376 3y ago
Your last paragraph is basically the conclusion of the article. “Agile” is so loaded it’s not worth using

i_have_an_idea 3y ago

Agile/Scrum is one of those things that are impossible to criticize. You can come up with a well-reasoned critique of Agile and there's always some Agile evangelist that pops up to tell you that you're not doing "real agile" and, therefore, your experience is invalid. At the same time, I have now done software engineering for over a decade, in many roles and teams, and I have never seen Agile or Scrum to lead to the development of a good piece of software. I guess we were using it wrong.

midasz 3y ago
What do you use that does lead to a good piece of software?
- SideburnsOfDoom 3y ago
  Individuals and interactions, over processes and tools.
- slivanes 3y ago
  By focusing on the product rather than the process.
  - midasz 3y ago
    How does that work? So you've already went through the steps of figuring out a process, or do you just pick one and stick with it - accepting shitty parts? What's the process?
    - oneshtein 3y ago
      You should start with the developing of the product as is happens, then use Continuous Improvement process to improve the development process. You can use SCRUM/Kanban/SaFE/LeSS, hybrid or other Agile methodology, or no process at all, but it will not help when people are not trained to be proper part of the process. For example, a PM may replace SCRUM meeting with a status meeting, because it makes his job easier, while PM or other M should not attend a SCRUM meeting at all, unless called in by engineers. The proper moment for interaction between PM and engineer are beginning/end of a ticket, sprint review, and sprint planning.

SideburnsOfDoom 3y ago

Yes. What I have said before, for the same reasons, is that when the average office that says "we do the Agile", what they mean is that they have top-down, upfront planned micromanagement via tools such as Jira. * This has nothing in common with the values of the Agile Manifesto. In fact it's more like the opposite of them. * I hate Jira. Jira is not the cause of the problem. People's desire for a tool like that is cause of Jira. Kill Jira, and it would soon be replaced with something much the same.

misnome 3y ago
We’re going to be officially moving to Agile! Soon. By which I mean the project planning committee has created a multi-hundred page document with precise BPM-style workflow charts (based on Jira, obviously), and non-technical managers have started being sent on multi-day training courses to learn how to follow them. It’s going to be a shitshow!
- SideburnsOfDoom 3y ago
  > the project planning committee has created a multi-hundred page document with precise workflow charts ... It’s going to be a shitshow! A Waterfall of effluent, spilling from the end of the process pipe, branded "Agile!" (TM, sponsored by Atlassian). What are you moving from ?

KevinMS 3y ago

Dave Thomas has a talk about this Agile is Dead https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a-BOSpxYJ9M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a-BOSpxYJ9M To oversimplify it, he says "agile" has become a noun when it was always meant to be an adjective. In other words, if you are "doing" agile, you aren't really being agile.

4pkjai 3y ago

A sales guy told me his team does Agile. I asked him what he meant. “We have don’t have assigned desks”.

Tabular-Iceberg 3y ago

Another problem is that the Agile OGs keep overselling their methodology. They keep saying that waterfall just doesn't work, yet almost all commercially successful (and unsuccessful) software is produced that way, whether they claim to use Agile or not. Would it be better if they used "real Agile"? Of course! But you only ever have to be just good enough.

benbruscella 3y ago

http://programming-motherfucker.com/ http://programming-motherfucker.com/

viraptor 3y ago
I wish that was a joke, but it's Zed so... No, you can't replace customer collaboration with more programming. When you're in a programming hole of misunderstood solutions, you can't fix that by doing more programming. When things keep changing without good reasons, you can't fix that by doing more programming, etc.
- bruce343434 3y ago
  When things keep changing without good reasons, you - tell the client to get their shit together - fire the client - walk away
- Tabular-Iceberg 3y ago
  He's not saying replacing customer collaboration with programming. He's saying replace bleeding clients dry under the pretense of customer collaboration with programming.
  - viraptor 3y ago
    He's saying the customer collaboration is just a con for bleeding clients dry and he should just do programming. I read "just" as only/instead in this case.
    - Tabular-Iceberg 3y ago
      As presently practiced they all indeed are cons for bleeding clients dry. I haven't met Zed, but I can't imagine he thinks he can read minds, he must ask at some point what the customer wants to get out of the project. But the endless bikeshedding meetings and piles of useless UML diagrams and other documents is indeed just a scam. The most absurd thing of it all is that even in-house development organizations behave the exact same way, despite having the exact opposite incentives.

sime2009 3y ago

The rarely discussed cornerstone of Agile is trusting the team and letting them organise themselves. For most organisation this represents a huge internal change in power structure. The Agile industrial complex can't really sell a message to their customers (i.e. managers) that the development teams should have the power and run themselves how they feel fit. This message amounts to "if this works, we can fire the managers". Not a popular message for managers. So, instead of building on an agile foundation, companies just add some story points and funny sounding meetings on top of the old structure and nothing really changes. It is Agile cosplay.

pitched 3y ago
I’ll take this a step further too and say that if Agile is being introduced by management, it means they don’t trust their teams to organize themselves. Agile, as sold, can’t actually work in that environment. The battle is already lost.
- sime2009 3y ago
  That's right. It can't be pushed down from above. The team has to want to do this and take the power. A manager can start work on this kind of culture shift without even saying the word "agile". They need to give their teams more trust and room to govern themselves. i.e. managers need to get out of the way. When a team is open to the idea of Agile or scrum, then the manager could ask the team if they would like training or coaching. But the ground has to be made fertile first.

codex_beta 3y ago

The agile approach is generally academic mumbo jumbo that is rarely effective/efficient in large-scale industrial practice. Coming from an industry where functional safety is paramount, I think the agile approach is rarely appropriate unless you want to effectively waste everyone's valuable time with unnecessary overheads. If the product has already been launched or is at a pre-launch stage AND the team is small and professional enough, it might even work, but then why bother with such processes and roles overheads in the first place! Irrespective of the chosen approach, it’s crucial to systematically elicit requirements, document specifications, and rigorously verify and validate everything. Implementation should ideally be supported by thorough unit tests, and, most importantly, all artifacts must be traceable across different abstraction layers and to the required level of detail.

EchoChamberMan 3y ago

As soon as "agile" became "Agile" with a capital A, the war was lost. "Doing" Agile is missing the point; one must be agile.

koreth1 3y ago

Scrum is the thing that has tainted "agile" in my opinion, because Scrum is so widespread that many people think they're the same thing. Leaving aside the "agile is a philosophy, not a methodology" argument, there are well-defined agile methodologies other than Scrum. I've worked at a couple Kanban shops and, while our dev processes were far from perfect, most of the things people routinely hate about "agile" just didn't come up at all because they're actually Scrum features. If the thing you don't like involves the words "sprint" or "standup," you are complaining about Scrum, not agile.