Hacker News Reader

Comment by wwww4alll | Hacker News Reader

Agile, as it’s practiced today is Jira driven disorganized waterfall, and has nothing to do with the OG agile principles.

Much like TDD, which works great when it’s dev driven, agile works great when it’s driven by dev team.

The problem happens when the PMs get involved and they have to schedule meetings to get basic status updates and have to implement their voodoo rituals to make it look like PMs are adding to project velocity. Planning Poker, lol.

It gets much worse on larger scope projects and many devs and PMs are inexperienced.

View on HN

Oh, man, you haven't seen Jira driven disorganized waterfall until you've seen SAFe -- Scaled Agile Framework. Basically Agile with cement shoes, for organizations that are scared to do anything without getting it countersigned in triplicate.

I love how there is an ongoing war between "the old guards" of agile and SAFe. Look up some of the rants, it's a great read. Certificate peddlers flaming each other.

SAFe has a great, telling name though - it's designed to be safe for corporate control freaks. They might not know waterfall, they just live it in their guts.

Easy to identify, they believe in being a "visionary leader" and "inspiring the lower rank".

The dev team can absolutely never drive a business process. Developers don't work with customers, don't measure revenue, don't do marketing. Scrum exists to facilitate clear communication about requirements in the smallest deliverable increments. Devs should be fully bought in and involved in decision making but product mangers have to be there to do discovery and set priorities. PMs are there to facilitate and measure progress which can mostly be done just by keeping tickets up to date.

If you have an inexperienced team, any process you adopt is going to suck.

As a dev I have spoken directly with customers in multiple projects, but based on mentioning revenue/marketing it seems you're coming from a consumer focus and not b2b implementations? It seems to be a common perspective on this site but it's not the only one.

Talking with a customer was great when we could, usually it's been when I worked in a small team (1-3 developers), speaking with either internal or external customers. We talk through what is needed then the BA/PM documents it in the updated job brief, rather than the other way around which leads to so much back and forth. It gets to the root of any uncertainty about what they want much quicker.

This is not any official brand of Agile. It's just our natural inclination when left alone. Talk, iterate, deliver.

I agree with everything you say. Part of the problem is PMs and the scrum masters with certificates and no technical experience run the show and play presenter/jira manager. Most of the time they have no idea what's going on and are glorified backwatchers.

I'd rather have multiple Sr. Devs be half time management, and half time dev. Or increase Sr. Dev pay by 20-30% and have them pick up management on top of their duties.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com