Hacker News Reader

Comment by willis936 | Hacker News Reader

I worked in fake agile for a few years. It took me a while to place my finger on why I never really loved everything about it, but I eventually decided that it felt like it was a façade to a management power grab. It gave the ability to micro manage workers to those who don’t understand the problems or even the product. If agile is necessary to be productive then you already have too many people involved. If it isn’t necessary then it introduces a lot of overhead for a little bit of book keeping (which isn’t inherently bad).

View on HN

I remember a time I worked with a team not using the agile process. We were agile.

When I worked in teams following the agile process, we were rigid.

Agile shouldn't be a process, mgt see it as such. It becomes a process. Clever engineers hate poorly thought out processes. Agile as a process is a contradiction in itself.

Agile is no process. Let the team find their ways and iterate as often as possible, along with a few other proven principles.

Points becomes estimates for managers, they will see it as such and build huge waterfall projects documents to track everthing, and they will pressure teams to deliver shitty software when they feel the stories are sand bagged.

Strange world we live in.

I remember a time I worked with a team not using the agile process. We were agile.

When I worked in teams following the agile process, we were rigid.

"The Agile that can be named is not the true Agile."[0]

I'm not being entirely facetious.

[0]https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Tao

I think that's pretty close to the truth. Like the Tao, you can point at instances of it, i.e., you can point to a particular team and the processes it is today using, and that is agile. But it is not Agile. On this same team I'm on, I've used different process a year ago, and two years ago, and now, and almost certainly in a year and two years. Those specific processes aren't Agile... but they were each agile, because we're constantly re-evaluating how we're working and what we're doing, and tuning our processes to match the environment we're in. If you take my agile process and just blindly apply it to your team, regardless of what that process is, that's not Agile. The grass of the field does not become a bird by shaping itself into wings.

I am more comfortable with a company talking about how agile they are if the teams are able change processes when and how they want to.

It's the burgerization of software development, where every engineer can be turned into a generic fungible burger-flipping engineering unit, and the output measured in the number of burgers flipped.

The software architecture is falling apart, the tech debt overshadows the actual debt of a small country, our subject matter expert quit the company over being micromanaged, and the clients are abandoning our buggy software for our competitors? What went wrong, we closed all of those JIRA tickets, surely that must be good for something.

Ticket driven development isn't just an agile issue though. Project management has always loved granular tasks and the assumption that at some point they are all worth the same effort.

I largely agree.

I’ll add this — To a large extent, many management systems are about reducing the failure modes — but I don’t see why a system must downplay creativity and deep thinking about the core business engine (often the software).

It took me a while to place my finger on why I never really loved everything about it, but I eventually decided that it felt like it was a façade to a management power grab.

Yup that's exactly it. Or to put it more delicately (than simply a "power grab"): a façade that servers various ulterior purposes -- from making their company seem hip and modern (to the uninformed) to simply being able to say "finally we have some structure!" even though it's very debatable whether new "structure" really brings the benefits that it claims to (and evidently brings many negatives on board with it).

But ultimately - a façade.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com