buzzword filled click-bait. :/
just use your brain. agile is only a problem when people follow it religiously instead of intelligently imo.
its just one tool in the box, not the ultimate methodology.
just use your brain. agile is only a problem when people follow it religiously instead of intelligently imo.
its just one tool in the box, not the ultimate methodology.
The agile manifesto has plenty of problems that should be obvious with some thinking. Some of the statements are outright ludicrous and naive as much as others are valuable insights (but even then, only if you haven't thought about the problem very much and tried to approach it in reality).
I shipped software very quickly before learning much about agile at all... I ship it even faster afterwards, but not because I agree with it all... in fact I am convinced I am better off for ignoring the more harmful aspects and selectively choosing the ones that have a measurable benefit.
Are we talking about the same document? What are the problems and harmful aspects that you're referring to? (Please quote the relevant part) This comment feels either a bit like a content-free middlebrow dismissal, or we're referring to different documents.
From the very first.
> Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
Have you seen this in practice and experienced how people work day-to-day? Leave them to their own devices and it varies a lot by personality. Some people need micro-management for instance... there is also thing that process is very important, and this point is self contradictory given that a lot of the agile manifest essentially describes process or a strategy for creating one... and as for ever relegating the importance of good tools.... ick.
?
(p.s. thanks for calling it out, its good to take these things seriously imo. its shows passion and care. :) )
That sentence is important for interpreting the statements.
But that is the point of the sentence. A process does not care about individual variation. What the manifesto is saying is exactly what you are saying.
> Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
needs to be read in conjunction with:
> while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more
Which means I can interpret it a way that is true, but not that interesting.
That is, I believe that a great developer with crappy tools will produce better software than a crappy developer with great tools
But I'm not sure what that really tells me other than "hire great people".
I guess, to some extent, it means "if the process says I should do X, but the team thinks it's a bad idea, then I should listen to them", but even that's is not a necessary conclusion from the statement. In the non-software world, you only need to spend a little bit of time looking at workplace deaths to see that many of them are caused by teams that decided to ignore safety protocols.
Ultimately the only thing I really take from the agile manifesto is that doing the exact opposite is bad, but so what?
I don't want to ever work in development team that:
- Thinks that "following a process" trumps "investing in good people"
- Prioritizes writing documentation for software rather than making it work
- Has watertight contracts but ultimately disappoints the customer
- Sticks to "the plan" even when it's obvious that the circumstances have changed.
But I didn't need a manifesto to tell me that.
For example, let's say that we did some project planning a month back, which says that we should start on a certain new project tomorrow. Everyone on the team is grumbling and no longer feels like that's a wise expenditure of resources. What should we do? Stick to our goal and follow the process, or get people together, work it out, and set new goals? Agile is saying, especially when you consider other bullets like "Responding to change over following a plan", that people subscribing to the Agile Manifesto value getting individuals together, collaborating, and responding to change more than following their plan.
But feel compelled to add: Agile is only a problem when teams pretend to follow it but actually don't.
Some of the points in the Agile manifesto are just arrogant, unjustified statements of fact or vague and useless comments.
Some people hate face-to-face interaction... and what the hell is a 'regular interval'... and sometimes a clear vision and direction from above achieves the very greatest of results that the team without it would have failed to produce.
Its not useless, but its not without fault either.
i prefer to think that a master craftsman is one who can take any tools and materials and use them to produce good work... if not exceptional.
If you are forced to use an inferior tool like Agile, then sure, you want to make the best of it and be a craftsman who can still succeed.
That is an endorsement of being adaptable and self-reliant as an engineer, not an endorsement of Agile.
And if a tool is bad like Agile, it's useful to point it out and slowly steer the bureaucracy that feeds it into bastardizing whatever the next tool is, but hopefully inching forward to a better global state as well.
Doing awesome things with primitive tools is a parlor trick. Grandstanding.
The craftsman blames themself for using the wrong tool for the job, not the tool.
Agile is actually hard to get to grips with. It requires lots of discipline. So did the pre-agile methods that worked best. And it gets half-done for the same reason that the pre-agile methods got half-done.
It's hard. Hard to do, hard to learn, tempting to stop.
Agile process without agile culture objectively isn't True Agile. It's worse than everything it sets out to solve with the alternatives.
Putting aside that particular nitpick, it's easy to cargo-cult the practices. I sometimes use the analogy of the introduction of lean manufacturing in the US. At first what was introduced were the tools: boards, line-stoppages etc. But tools are just tools, by themselves they're not enough.
The uncomfortable, expensive and difficult truth in our industry is that people, process and tooling are not substitutable. You need the best of all three that you can get.