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Comment by tux1968 | Hacker News Reader

tux1968

But that isn't evidence that the method works. If you're a native tribe, that has an ancient traditional rain dance, it is invoked whenever there is a drought. Sometimes it rains shortly after the dance is performed. But if it doesn't rain, it's not proof that you danced poorly, it's evidence that you didn't understand the situation fully or properly. The instructions or "wisdom" you relied on, didn't actually capture something useful.

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My evidence is that I was on a team that was not overly controlled by management and had clever people in it without any instant attitudes of rejection so they adapted to it. We produced updates bi-weekly and we had a huge backlog of stupid features which we were never going to get round to - we were able to get the important things done and it was one of the best feelings I've ever had about work.

Since then I've been on teams with any number of pathologies. From developers it is sometimes the desired to be special - those ones who want to work on their bit of the code and not let anyone else touch it. From managers it's things like forcing the way stories are split so that they're always too large and can never fit into a sprint - because they think that everything must be a "user visible change". Management types also sit in retrospectives and use them to crap on everyone. Product managers demand features which they don't know will really interest customers and are inflexible about them - they want "everything" just in case and that delays the work and deletes any chance of a feedback loop.

The good agile feeling came from being able to have control and be successful. When it's messed up, you're out of control and cannot avert disasters. Whatever method you want to call it, I think we need to feel we're in control enough to succeed.

What is the chance that you've perfectly captured every aspect of the situation that led to success? Versus, what is the chance that you were lucky enough to be in situations where a multitude of factors, both appreciated and unappreciated, combined to lead to success?

There are a million possible reasons for failure, but here is a very easy one: It doesn't matter how good you feel about the development process, if the company has the wrong objective. You will still end up being frustrated, and failing. Of course this will have all sorts of pathological and uncomfortable ramifications.

So while it is easy to say, "just act this way and you'll have success". You're not actually appreciating all the hidden elements that allow any hope of acting that way. You've been lucky enough to be in situations where it happened to work (ie. the rain dance made rain), but that does not mean it's actually representative, or that the prescription actually captures the critical information needed to ensure success for other people. Instead, you've described a rain dance.

You're right - there isn't one way to do things or one way that always works. There are issues that are outside a team's control, for example, that make it an impossible struggle. If you're rigidly forced to do something and cannot adapt then you're ... not really agile. But you have to understand why you're doing what you're doing and keep adjusting to see what works for you.

#1 IMO is that if the company you're in is non-agile in its general attitude, which is influenced by its own customers, then everything is geared against you.

That isn't to say that something like Kanban might not be usable or better than no plan at all but certainly scrum is not some universal solution.

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