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from the what-if-you-can't-program-your-way-out-of-a-paper-bag? dept.
Agile Development is hip. It's hot. All the cool kids are doing it.
But it doesn't work.
Before I get into why this "Agile" stuff is horrible, let's describe where Agile/Scrum can work. It can work for a time-sensitive and critical project of short duration (6 weeks max) that cross-cuts the business and has no clear manager, because it involves people from multiple departments. You can call it a "Code Red" or call it a Scrum or a "War Room" if you have a physical room for it.
Note that "Agile" comes from the consulting world. It suits well the needs of a small consulting firm, not yet very well-established, that lands one big-ticket project and needs to deliver it quickly, despite changing requirements and other potential bad behavior from the client. It works well when you have a relatively homogeneous talent level and a staff of generalists, which might also be true for an emerging web consultancy.
As a short-term methodology when a firm faces an existential risk or a game-changing opportunity, I'm not opposed to the "Code Red"/"crunch time"/Scrum practice of ignoring peoples' career goals and their individual talents. I have in mind that this "Code Red" state should exist for no more than 6 weeks per year in a well-run business. Even that's less than ideal: the ideal is zero. Frequent crises reflect poorly on management.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Snotnose on Thursday January 04 2018, @04:12PM (7 children)
Yeah, and it sucks in the real world. My horror story? Around 1990 I was working on a military radar project that required a DSP card called Sky Warrior. Sky Warrior had a mode called chaining, where you could build a chain of DSP operations, tell it to go, and it would interrupt the CPU when it was done. Some 3-4 times faster than feeding it each DSP op one at a time.
I'm a device driver/OS level guy. When I get new hardware I like to play with it because it never works the way the manual says it will. As this was a waterfall project I was allowed to look at the box on the shelf, but not actually plug the card in and play with it. So I did the entire design based on the manual.
Gets to where it's time to actually write the code and guess what? Chaining doesn't work. Contact the vendor, they haven't implemented it because nobody had asked for it yet. Without chaining there's no way to meet my timing requirements.
Even better. When I joined the company I estimated it was a 3 month project, start to finish, including testing/documentation. It wasn't that difficult. We ended up spending a year doing nothing but writing docs, re-writing docs, doing stupid stuff like renumbering 1.2.3.4 to 1.2.4, etc etc. I got fed up and quit after a year. I never actually touched a Sky Warrior, a co-worker had to implement my design. We'd meet for beers and she would tell her tale, she'd be pissed as hell due to the unpaid overtime and career damage this was causing, I was laughing my ass off because I'd been saying for a year "this is gonna fail bigly".
That was the last time I worked on a military contract. I don't have the temperament to stroke my dick for a year doing useless crap, I want to get in, get the job done, and move on.
My ducks are not in a row. I don't know where some of them are, and I'm pretty sure one of them is a turkey.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Thursday January 04 2018, @04:50PM (3 children)
Solution: Sue the vendor for not delivering the advertised functionality. Bonus effect: Next time you'll have much better chances of the manual matching the actual product.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by Snotnose on Thursday January 04 2018, @05:01PM (2 children)
Rumor was the company was looking into that, but those things are a couple levels above my pay grade. I do suspect the U.S. Navy put Sky Warrior on a do not buy list somewhere though.
The problem with suing? The company was a startup. Doubtful you'd recoup the legal fees. Also keep in mind as I said earlier, especially back in those days it was common for marketing to advertise stuff engineering wasn't scheduled to start for another year, or for new silicon to have pretty bad bugs.
My ducks are not in a row. I don't know where some of them are, and I'm pretty sure one of them is a turkey.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 04 2018, @05:20PM (1 child)
Intel apparently had a part that acted differently depending on 1 undocumented pin strap (it was documented differently for each sku).
They sold this part in two different markets at vastly different prices, but using the same silicon. Long story short, someone fucking up the shipping orders and sent a load of the cheap parts in place of the expensive parts, the staff at the site didn't check the labelling until after they had installed a few of these parts on their product, and then noticed the product ids were wrong. Long story short: There were some harsh words exchanged over their pricing and the fact that the much cheaper part worked exactly the same (having in fact gone through the exact same testing regime.)
(Score: 2) by Snotnose on Thursday January 04 2018, @08:51PM
While we're telling funny stories. Early 80's, early days of robots putting parts in holes on boards (called pick and place). Got a batch of 30 or so boards that didn't work. I was a tech at the time and grabbed one. Very strange patterns on my O'scope.
Turns out whomever loaded the pick and place machine had put a reel of resistors where caps were supposed to go, and put the reel of caps where the resistors were supposed to go.
After 30 years bet I've got more stories than 90% of you young whippersnappers who covet my lawn.
My ducks are not in a row. I don't know where some of them are, and I'm pretty sure one of them is a turkey.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday January 04 2018, @05:12PM
By 1990 "Military Intelligence" was already a well known oxymoron.
Sounds like you're out of sync with your employers and co-workers. Sure, it's 3 months of technical work, but isn't it better to get paid for 2 years? Now, if they're doing unpaid overtime, it sounds like they squeezed too hard while milking their particular cow...
Around 2000, I joined a med-device company that was in the process of "shrinking" their current design. The project was at 2.5 years since launch with an original forecast of 2 years total development time. I was assigned "Principal Engineer" of the existing design in production, which basically meant not signing off on boneheaded production change proposals while looking for something real to do. I hung around there for 2.5 years, sticking my nose in the development project because it was the only "new thing" going on, and watched them sit and spin the whole time. After I left, it was another 3 years before the "new thing" launched, nearly 8 years in development, all to take the existing functionality and put it in a smaller box (and they had prototypes up and running within 1 year...)
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 04 2018, @05:49PM
If you weren't allowed to write your software using the actual hardware it would be running on (and the hardware actually existed already so you could have tried it) then that isn't waterfall, that's simple mismanagement and a dishonest vendor. Let's count up the problems:
* buying a product based on advertising without verifying the performance
* delaying testing until it's too late to fix anything
* committing to a supplier without letting your own engineers vet them
None of that is specified by waterfall! Not that waterfall is super great, but these aren't reasons it's bad. Just that project was bad and it happened to also use waterfall.
For what it's worth, none of these are uncommon, either. I've had all of them happen to me - though certainly not all at once. One was even sort-of my fault (for not double checking everything the vendor did even though I had a warning sign).
(Score: 2) by turgid on Thursday January 04 2018, @09:39PM
This 100%
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].