SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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: 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]