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posted by cmn32480 on Thursday January 04 2018, @02:11PM   Printer-friendly
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.


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  • (Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 04 2018, @05:49PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 04 2018, @05:49PM (#617830)

    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).

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