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Comment by snarfy | Hacker News Reader

After doing software for almost 30 years now, I honestly believe Agile has been the most destructive thing to happen to the industry. Software has become buggy shit that's shoveled out the door as fast as possible. It's not just your development team, it's all development teams.

Windows 10 update deleting your files? Is it the lack of testing, poor code quality, too many features or not enough engineers?

Ultimately it's going to boil down to some cargo cult scrum process of reviews, retros, and bs that we are all familiar with, and Windows 10 is buggy. Android is buggy. iOS is buggy. Nobody cares about the software. They blindly follow the process.

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> Windows 10 is buggy. Android is buggy. iOS is buggy.

Let's not pretend bugs didn't exist in the pre-agile/scrum era. Bugs have been around as long as software has been around.

I think it's safe to say that bugs are way more predominant in software that used to be reliable. It's not that the software was completely bug free, it's the quantity and quality of the bugs now being presented.

I don’t think that’s safe to say at all. I’d love to see research that backed that up.

If anything I’d say we might be exposed to more bugs because the quantity of software has gone up, not that quality has gone down.

I don't think windows used to be more reliable. It used to crash all the time. Do you remember the blue screen of death[0]?

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Screen_of_Death

But I don't remember any BSOD wiping all my documents just like that.

I mean windows 95/98 didn't even use a journaled filesystem... a BSOD could wipe your documents...

Could it be that since software is just everywhere in our lives, and unless we need a strong enforcement of quality (I'm thinking of safety critical systems, which can still have flaws), then society is OK with it being released in that state?

The individual or organization making that call doesn't really get punished, while the upside can get even higher if they can release earlier, faster, etc.

There are now more completely obvious bugs in widely used software. It's like developers care less.

Honorable mention to the fact that software used to be a lot harder to distribute. Making disks and CDs was slow and expensive, but now we can push a patch any time over the Internet. Why not ship fast when shipping a patch is just easy?

Where I work hot fixes for iOS apps often take more than a month. At a previous job I pushed App Store changes all the time in a day or two (if Apple was willing).

Because that inherently means pushing a shitty experience onto your users.

> Software has become buggy shit that's shoveled out the door as fast as possible.

This comes up a lot in dealing with PMs and those funneling requirements to developers: What is "good enough"?

"Good enough" for a software project means different things to different people, and is influenced by factors like time, cost, and attention.

Oftentimes, there's conflicting desires/statements from stakeholders in the Agile process. For example: - Executives approve an iterative "MVP" software plan proposed by the PMs. - PMs deliver plan to developers, and give them a schedule. - Developers deliver the software "as-is" based on what was scoped in the MVP plan. - Executives (or some other party) are demoed the software, and undoubtedly come up with list of things that could be done differently or questions like "Why don't we have this feature in..." - PMs funnel down the executive feedback to the developers; developers say "This wasn't in scope for MVP..."

Where iteration and speed falls apart is when those judging the work want things to move out the door on schedule and as cheaply as possible, while still have the software fit their liking and follow an unrealistically ideal development path.

Happy to see people questioning agile. There are two books which the skeptics might find interesting:

* Agile, the good bad and ugly by Bertrand Meyer

* Balancing agility and discipline by Boehm

Agile Coach here, there’s more truth to this than you may know. I’ve commented here about this before.

With agile many companies (often helped by consultants) threw out what little design and engineering common sense we scraped together over the preceding decades and, in practice, made small teams of developers directly accountable to their customers. Whilst customers saw immediate benefit the loss of air cover from engineering leadership hath wrought a mess of technical debt the scale of which is hard to fathom.

I’m thoroughly fed up with my field. Agile coaches are, for the most part, fucking muppets with no significant engineering or leadership background. Fire them all.

I doubt you've been doing software for 30 years if you think software these days is buggy compared to software 20+ years ago. The amount of software these days is incredibly vast compared to back then, and the size of the software has increased, and the complexity has increased. Given all that, software these days is far less buggy.

I don't know how you're measuring it, but certainly not if you count the number of bugs.

How are you measuring it? Where do you get your numbers? What are your numbers, for that matter?

Windows 10 failed because they fired all there testers...

Which is exactly what happens in many "agile" projects, test team gets replaced by devops and unit tests.

Except those unit tests get a lower priority than writing documentation.

And we all know which priority writing documentation gets.

Not sure what “agile” projects you are talking about, but SCRUM doesn’t advocate writing documentation.

Also SCRUM has a concept of Definition of Done, which can include writing the unit/functional/integration tests related to your task.

Also SCRUM recommends to have a human tests that your task is not bugged before shipping (that’s the job of the PO or the tech lead).

That is the theory, then there is the actual practice on software development battlefield.

Since when is this an excuse for not exhibiting courage to adhere to the framework? Scrum was built on experience, not theory anyways.

What courage are you talking about?

I just stated a fact about how many companies state they do agile, SCRUM or otherwise, while reality shows otherwise.

For those companies, the definiton of done is management slideware.

Which is exactly the main theme of Foley's talk.

Well, testers are the first to go to cut cost... Usually..

This was true ten years ago and is under agile still true..

Doesn't help of course, but high quality cannot be tested into a product.

I'd place more blame on inexperienced developers that don't know you should never delete user files unless completely sure they aren't needed. Even then they should be put in a backlog to be deleted later.

But testing is part of scrum! /s

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