Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by f4stjack | Hacker News Reader

Full thread

f4stjack

For me, Agile is a good idea implemented badly and subverted by the "business people" to hell and back.

Without going into details, I find its core methodology cool.

- You meet with the client, get an overview of the project

- Cobble together something in the given time

- Show the product-in-development, get the feedback from the client

- Rinse repeat until the product and the client needs are aligned

But from my experience the real-world implementation is meetings. More and more meetings. After a while client loses interest and basically leaves you to do something, which diverges from the real world need and solves an imaginary problem.

This happened so much that, I find my gorge rising whenever someone says "Oh we are using agile methodology"

View on HN

I’m at a place that’s implementing it backwards: “let’s train everyone doing the actual work on all the ceremonies and how to waste a bunch of time dicking around in issue trackers… wait you’re missing every sprint goal badly, why? We better figure that out!”

We could have told you why before any of this: tasks get dropped on us and we’re told to work on them without yet having the necessary access, context, a firm explanation of what actually needs to be done, often no idea who it’s for or who knows can answer the questions we have, et c. So we lose 1-2 two-week sprints figuring out a bunch of crap that the right people could have put together in a day or three, then get to actually start the development work. Getting that right should be table stakes before starting with all the ceremonies and shit.

Fixing that is everything and doesn’t require “agile”. Do that and everything will work great. Agile will get the credit if we do ever fix that, but has nothing to do with it.

[edit] oh and of course they’re paying external agile consultants for all this, further increasing waste.

> But from my experience the real-world implementation is meetings. More and more meetings.

And worse, no accountability. If deadlines are slipped or progress is not made well or fast enough, it's noted but nothing real done about it (except, maybe, more meetings).

>Agile is a good idea implemented badly

Where I work, they should hand out tee shirts with this phrase on it to all developers.

The only thing Agile is used for is to track points, nothing else. Across teams, points have the same meaning, points are rolled up by group to the VP. Plus each team is tasked to increase their points per iteration by 10%.

The teams are judged on points, not quality.

A big waste.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com