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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 05 2018, @01:20AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 05 2018, @01:20AM (#618146)

    You can open the bonnet of a car and look at the engine. You can't "see" software. You can't evaluate it just by looking at it. You have to read the source. You have to execute it in test harnesses.

    Yes, this complicates things, but that also applies to microelectronics and (cellular) biology. Yet, we seem to know a lot more about those mechanisms than we know about the software we use in our programs. And that's odd, given that the software has been designed by ourselves, not by nature -- we shouldn't need to "discover" anything about it.

    In order for software development to become proper engineering (in other words, to advance from astrology to astronomy), what we need is better tooling. And I don't mean that in the compiler/editor sense, but in the scientific sense: better language to unambiguously describe it, better metrics to evaluate it (not just performance, but reliability, robustness, completeness), better analysis to predict future behaviour (fuzzing and testing frameworks are a step in the right direction at least).

    That does have its advantages, though. Monocultures are bad, in nature and engineering.

    Yup, I didn't mean to imply monoculture here. I very much want a diverse software ecology, but one where interfacing with other components is as easy as just importing it into your build system -- the component specs should be extensive enough for your build system to automatically generate the correct bindings. Ah, one can dream...