Comment by Jach | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Jach | Hacker News Reader

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I'll offer my 6am reasoning-by-analogy commentary in a slightly inflammatory style to keep the mood. Your third paragraph, if you change all the keywords, looks like something a converted Scientologist might say! All your friends tell you it's stupid and give you reasons why you should be unhappy ("Look at how much money you're giving them!") and so forth, but by golly, you look back at your life just a few years ago and things seem so much better now! You don't feel like you're doing anything wrong, and by objective accounts if you're genuinely happier you probably aren't doing anything wrong in the grand scheme of things. Why wouldn't you feel good supporting your Church with huge sums of your income anyway?

In short, the brainwashing worked and you're under the influence of a beneficial placebo effect. Maybe the placebo effect is what explains the 10% "success stories" of not-screwed-up Agile Teams that Yegge hints at.

Or not. I don't know. I do know that for me any productivity hacks are temporary at best and ineffectual by default, and I'm wary of ones that have been actively dangerous for a good number of people; when akrasia is solved in general humanity will rejoice...

Unlike "genuine happiness", things like delivery times, defect rates, and numbers of patches seem concrete and easily measurable. (I left customer satisfaction out, but for all I know companies have objective ways to measure this as well.)

Ok but I believe the burden of proof is on you. I'll claim that adhering to some principles has given us quantifiably better results, and that the time scale is long enough that any Hawthrone Effect would've worn out by now.

Also, "productivity hack" is not a label I'd use to describe e.g. automated testing. YMMV.

My personal theory on XP, and to a lesser extent Agile, is that about 90%, if not 120%, of the benefit is in the pervasive use of automated testing, and the rest is either marginal in comparison, or even harmful but propped up by the benefit you scored by using automated testing so it all looks net positive in the end. (Hence the 120%; the benefit of just using automated testing is indeed greater than the whole package.)

I can't prove it. And I do like iterations in the sense of "produce a deliverable product every N weeks" for keeping you from wandering too far down the wrong path, though from what I've seen one of the most popular things to do with agile is just break your calender up by "iterations" then keep doing the same thing you did before. It's sort of hard to get a real sense of the utility of agile because hardly anybody really seems to really try it. (I do not necessarily think every aspect of it should be kept, but much of what it proposes is at least worth a real try. And "trying" shouldn't be a matter of smearing new words over the same procedures.)

Actually, the burden of proof should be on you. The null hypothesis is that adhering to agile principles has no positive affect on the outcome of software projects. In order to show that these principles have worth, you should disprove the null hypothesis.

I disagree. I've laid out my arguments best as I can, pointing to how we've measured and that we've seen improvements. In response to that, the commenter compares the post to scientology.

The hypothesis under discussion here isn't "these principles have value", it's "even though implementing these principles gave measurable value, they're still snake oil comparable to scientology".

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