This issue largely disappears if your engineers are given the proper context, background and system overview.
I'm not advocating everybody should take their project and run with it for weeks on end, but daily updates are ridiculous.
In fact, not only should you be able to give daily updates, you should be able to ship functionality on the daily. From first line of code into production and in front of customers should only ever take about 2 to 16 hours of work.
If you can't work at that cadence, you're probably not being as effective as you could be, as a developer. A "good" manager enables you to work like this.
Agile is, by far, a more effective way to run an R&D shop. By far.
"Agile teams show progress with working software, not documents. Right from the beginning. And that's huge." [1]
[0] The Art of Agile Development, pp. 35 [1] The Art of Agile Development, pp. 8
So I don't know, and quite frankly we didn't really care if we were "agile." All we found was that "agile" is simply too lossy of a descriptor for meaningful conversations about development process.
People writing books and blogs about what they mean when they say "agile" hasn't caused the industry to coalesce on a concise definition. That horse is out of the barn, and I don't expect we're getting it back.
It's not as effective if you're not working in software, or at least I don't know how effective it is, but that's not what this submission is about.
"Don't assume that your team should build what it's told to build. Instead assume the opposite: nobody really knows what you should build, not even the people asking for it. Your team's job is to take those ideas, test them, and learn what you should really build." [0]
That's your team's job. Not to make guesses by assuming you know what's best, not to do what they're told by customers, but to run tests and use results to inform next steps. That's the entire purpose of a development team, and you simply cannot do this without a quick iterative cycle.
[0] The Art of Agile Development, pp. 453
I think the reason people aren't fully agreeing with you is that there's a lot of important stuff where a quick iterative cycle in front of a customer eliminates the possibility of high-value outcomes.
The point you're trying to make isn't the novel insight I think you're trying to present it as. Of course you don't just build what your customer asks for blindly, of course you design with the future in mind, none of that is precluded whatsoever by iterating quickly to provide value and test what your customer needs.
In a past life I had developed 3 generations of tooling to support a certain complex and information-dense task that was essential to the business. Generational change was not incremental and required months/years exploring the problem domain and prototyping and backtracking and intentionally not consulting anyone. If I came out of stealth too early I'd be directed back to a gen 1 approach that was functionally and architecturally exhausted and could not meet the business needs at a reasonable cost. By the time I was done I understood the problem domain better than the business did. (I will stipulate that most of the time this is a bad approach--but sometimes it's absolutely necessary.)
My (aspirational) purpose at work is to surprise my customer with valuable and insightful solutions that they could not have arrived at incrementally, or with their methods, or with their team. Surely you can see how this is in direct conflict with rapid iteration in collaboration with them?
Except you're not inventing things, you're discovering things. That's a big difference. The best way to discover if something works, is to put it into the hands of customers as fast as possible while minimizing your expense at doing so.
You're "lowercase a" agile if you operate under the prioritization outlined in the Agile Manifesto. I think most of the people who've found consistent success with agile would say that's what matters is more about that than about XP or SCRUM or Kanban or whatever.
Those systems can help, but to be agile is to focus more on individuals, working software, customer collaboration, and responsiveness and less on processes, documentation, contracts, and plans.
I hesitate even to reword the items in the manifesto, just because I know it took a lot of very smart people a good while to agree to the specific wording, and it's seemingly stood the test of time.
That said, I don't think waterfall works any better there either. Sometimes there's no way past the "muck about and find things out" work.
Breaking down work into small, day-or-two chunks is a team effort that the developers are doing together, alongside the customer (representative, usually).
I've worked on teams that run the full gamut here. Those that did scrum and enforced "an every task should be one or two days" did not ship more or higher quality software than those that didn't, and the development teams were consistently more stressed and less satisfied with their work.
This also ignores the fact that there is a huge amount of important work that is effectively invisible to the end user, but is absolutely crucial. The workflow you're suggesting disincentives the team from working on those things, and may even punish them for it (as they are not shipping customer visible features).
And before you try to list off work you think fits this category, I urge you to think about how that work could affect a customer's experience.
Because it's invisible, what's the point of arbitrarily shipping it in one-to-two day chunks to "gather user feedback"? Be willing to take the time to do hard things right. I'm not proposing you spin your wheels for ages on something, and I'm generally in favor of shipping early and often, it's just trying to fit every different shaped problem into the same process that doesn't work for me.
And I get that this idea may not work for you, but it works for a lot of very successful people, the luminaries of our field. You're arguing against Ward Cunningham, Robert C. Martin, James Shore, Martin Fowler, Joel Spolsky, Jeff Atwood, Bill Wake, Andrew Hunt, Dave Thomas, et. al.
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation. [0]
Who should I listen to; you, or them?
Solve the problem at hand in the way that suits that particular problem best. Don't be a slave to a rigid process. Don't burn out your developers with a dysfunctional system.
Not every problem is well suited to being broken up into single day chunks of work. Not every developer can maintain a healthy relationship to their work with that level of micromanagement. There is a huge amount of anecdotal evidence about this if you read any thread about developer burnout, or modern day scrum and agile. You mention the Agile Manifesto, but seem to forget that one of the primary points is "individuals and interactions over processes and tools".
Delivering software to your customer is an interaction. You need more of those, not less of those.
"Stories are "just right" when the whole team can finish four to ten per week, or about six on average." [0]
"For stories that are too big, work with your customers to split them into smaller stories." [0]
If you think it's just "Everything gets shipped every day or two and no other changes get made to how the team functions." then I have not been clear. It's a massive mindset shift, and it comes with a number of other important changes, all of which are best read from the experts themselves, rather than interpreted through me in an HN comment.
Suffice it to say, it's all been accounted for. Agile works.
[0] https://www.amazon.com/Art-Agile-Development-Pragmatic-Softw...
> Not every problem is well suited to being broken up into single day chunks of work. Not every developer can maintain a healthy relationship to their work with that level of micromanagement. There is a huge amount of anecdotal evidence about this if you read any thread about developer burnout, or modern day scrum and agile. You mention the Agile Manifesto, but seem to forget that one of the primary points is "individuals and interactions over processes and tools".
I don't plan to continue the conversation at this point, because it's not productive.
And if you are doing "Agile" but it's not working... then you're Doing It Wrong(tm). Right?
There are lots of reasons agile won't work for you, but they're also great indications you should probably leave a given org.
"Agile" software development doesn't work when there's 5 non-technical stakeholders and 1 software developer.
I took a week to refactor some nasty crap a few months ago. No customer noticed it.
I was rather happy to lower the estimated time for a bunch of other tasks from weeks to days/hours after doing it.
Now you can argue that was not "absolutely crucial", but then we'll just disagree on what that means.
> I urge you to think about how that work could affect a customer's experience
Why is this the be-all and end-all?
Oh, our customer? It's the Oligarchic Cell Phone Company. They don't move fast. And as a result, neither do we.
This is a great example of the perverse incentives built into the "everything should be done in one day chunks that you report on daily". The team is incentivized to ignore highly important but challenging / hidden work, and instead only focus on things that are highly visible to management.
Hell, I've fixed 1 liner bugs that have taken me a week to figure out.
...
- ask for help
- try to explain how it's supposed to work
- try to explain how it's not working
- Listen to them come up with all the ideas that I've already ruled out
- Try to explain why their preferred idea has already been
ruled out or is not actually relevant to the problem
- conclude they still don't understand the problem or even
how this part of the system works
- go ahead and just solve the problem myself
...
What I've found to be a good middle ground is take some time to think things through myself first, at least in rough strokes. Then have someone else come in and review the work. There is a balance of doing too much vs too little yourself of course, but I don't think there is a hard and fast rule (e.g. 1 day worth) for it.
There are a lot of ways to keep your team updated, but more importantly, it's frankly arrogant to think you can or even should tackle any problem on your own.
When Joe has a problem with X, he should go ask for help, even though he's the one best able to deal with it? Should he ask himself for help?
Can you see the problem with blanket statements like this?
That said, I don't know how to change the situation if you have devs with skillsets that don't seem to overlap much, which seems inevitable for some companies
I didn't make up any of this, it comes directly from Joel Spolsky in his article titled, "Evidence Based Scheduling". [0]
[0] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2007/10/26/evidence-based-sch...
This creates unnecessary exaggerated expectations. There is only so much you can accomplish in one day, some functionality take way loger than that. We don't want to ship half baked solutions, but we are expected to do so... In order to accomplish that sacrifices have to be made on everything else that is important in software development: proper testing, documentation, refactoring and a clean codebase. Its perfectly valid for a developer to give the update "I am still working on ..." / "I am still trying to figure out:..." / "I am in the process of preparing the codebase for this update" for a certain period of time.
1) "Everyday you should ship something" 2) "At the end of each day you should be able to tell your line manager in a clear and concise way exactly what you did; if you can't you've done nothing."
2) does not mean ship code: you could have spent 12 hours thinking and reading code. But if you can explain i.e provide a daily update, then you have actually done something, and not spent a day on slack sending memes.
i've had days where I did nothing but read code trying to understand a bug, and then my whole contribution was 1 line of config or 2 lines of code. But I have a clear achievement: I understood an area of the code much better and i have a fix.
Having daily updates to your manager also forces you to not slack and work on the most important problems: otherwise you might be tempted to work on sth fun but not mission critical.
At the end of the day, people should do as they wish.
Many software developers are not that effective at making rapid progress (for whatever reasons), so if you are actually highly skilled and highly motivated you can produce multiple of the progress of some coworkers. But generally management doesn't deliver high performers who deliver multiples of progress multiples of salary, instead they fight to keep it to small percentage rises and don't even fire the deadwood!
This (mis)management destroys intrinsic motivation of high performers and the manager is left with deadwood and skilled but unmotivated people and some average performers, which try to micromanage to get results out of.
It's probably a lot more effective to keep your team up to date on what you're doing, than it is to keep your boss up to date on what you're doing, and that's where I was focusing.
And yeah, while I did say "ship functionality", you're right, the real value is producing something you can show users. I prefer that ends up being code, because otherwise users are hard to pin down, but it doesn't have to be.
Finally yes, people should do as they wish, but with the understanding that if the thing they'd prefer to work on isn't the thing the team they're working on needs, that the team should be able to go find someone who does want to do the thing the team needs. It's not really fair to drag a team down because one person isn't having fun.
The systems supporting shipping daily should exist either way, though.