Hacker News Reader

Comment by commandlinefan | Hacker News Reader

> I have never seen SCRUM or any agile approach working in a project setup ever. I am biased, though, because a company that truly lives agile values won’t do software development in a project setup

When I first read the Agile Manifesto - around '99, I think - it seemed clear to me that this was a great leap forward in software design, but that it was clearly implied that this couldn't be used in a "fixed deadline" environment. I really wish they had actually called that out in the manifesto itself and made that more obvious.

View on HN

I've always been bothered by the (sometimes massive amount of) hate that I see in the internet towards agile. The experiences from other developers always seem a bit off, like something is not right.

I think your point might be the missing piece. Agile might not mix too well with fixed timeframes or fixed budgets, but rather needs an environment of continuous development where the requirements have room to drive the project within wide enough budgetary boundaries.

This to me feels sort of a natural way to build things. If we need something we build it, otherwise we don't. And those "needs" might pop up at any time, by external (customer requests etc.) or internal (new techical requirements become apparent as the project is being developed) events.

My experiences of agile development have been from companies without deadlines and are generally positive.

How would your team motivate that it should keep its headcount during a budget cut? Without deadlines they could just say "Since nothing you do is urgent we will cut your headcount in half, other teams needs it more".

Urgency doesn't imply value. Time horizons can vary and while there tends to be a correlation of cost and time horizons (higher urgency - higher costs, lower urgency - lower costs) that doesn't mean one is more or less valuable, it just costs more.

ER doctors may provide urgent surgery or medical intervention that's life saving and usually that costs a lot more than say long term chemotherapy or say HIV management with a specialist. Both are life saving, it just turns out that one conveniently has a longer time horizon which makes it easier to juggle to reduce costs while the other requires full attention and makes it difficult to juggle clients.

You would hope management doing budget cuts would adjust budget cuts based on value provided. This is arguably difficult to quantify in many cases but it shouldn't be quantified by how many, likely artificial, deadlines a group has and how busy they look. That's just silly.

It's probably because Agile devolved from a system teams use to keep track of developer progress on bugs and features to some weird cult lead by managers who have 20 hours of meetings a week and can't begin to describe half of the projects they're meeting about.

> hate that I see in the internet towards agile

The reason is that enterprise implementations of "agile" are often the opposite of agile: waterfall with no frequent releases nor customer feedback, but lip service to agile practices and middle management ceremonies.

If you go through the agile manifesto and compare, these implementations violates all the points listed.

"agile" (the manifesto) was stating the obvious for people working on a product that had a lifetime longer than a "project". It works for products that have an ongoing life.

What it doesn't work with is environments with projects and budgets that are quarterly or annually assigned. That's where abominations like "scaled agile" have arisen.

Scaled Agile (TM) and Scrum and all the rest of the ceremony are like ORMs are to SQL database, an attempt to correct the impedance mismatch between the way software teams work and the way companies work.

> The experiences from other developers always seem a bit off, like something is not right.

That's the point.

Agile is difficult to do exactly right. When done wrong my perception is that is produces far more dysfunction and stress at an individual level than alternative project management methodologies.

If you've heard the fitness saying, "the best workout plan is the one you stick to," my feelings about project management are pretty similar. Agile may be great, but if your organization isn't capable of sticking to its central ideas then it's just not going to work. In that situation you're better off picking a methodology that's less efficient but easier to implement (like waterfall).

There are also some fundamental challenges presented by the methodology that are genuinely difficult to deal with. These tend to be ignored and then they manifest as dysfunction elsewhere in the system.

Could you expand on this? A fixed deadline can mean fixed budget, which the majority software projects fall under.

Agile requires just in time requirements and priority setting, coupled with the ability to make small changes and iterate.

If you have a "this feature needs to be delivered by X date" type of corporate culture, then you have to make a commitment, and because dates are almost always tight, you need to be as efficient as possible to achieve that goal.

So basically you have the software teams wanting to work in two week sprints, and you have execs needing new thing for contract launch in X weeks, and guess who wins? It's not the software developer, so the agile becomes toothless, because you're not learning, or iterating. You're just pushing against a gantt chart the whole way a sprint at a time, and might not even be able to release beta versions and get feedback, because that takes up valuable time.

I'm not as cynical as OP, but there is a really big push/pull that happens, and it can turn into a toxic environment if forces too far outside the product/development cycle dictate priorities (like sales, or execs).

I don't agree that Agile requires JIT requirements but benefits from and thus promotes them as the best way to deliver requirements for a feature.

Under waterfall, a document is written by an analyst that describes a problem to be fixed. Six months later, the task is picked up but legal regulations or market conditions or even the rest of the software has changed. However, the Waterfall requirements are the requirements and that's what gets implemented. Best-case scenario is that the business analyst that wrote the original spec is still employed and has been updating the requirements as conditions change.

What we've done at successful agile shops I've been a part of is quarterly planning that collects at a high-level the current requests/needs of the business, prioritizes them, they get a t-shirt size to determine if all of the requests/needs can be met during the quarter and they fall off by priority until you're left with a manageable high-level plan of work for the quarter. Then those high-level requests are decomposed into epics and stories which are specced out and estimated, etc.

It works very well but it requires that people work collaboratively from the executives and business stake-holders to the technical leadership and individual engineers.

A: "We are agile here"

B: "When was the last time you met with a customer?"

A: "Never"

"Customer collaboration over contract negotiation" used to mean something.

I mean, why not? Are there any other methodologies that reliably deliver complete, working software on a "fixed deadline" basis?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com