Rock Shed Near Limekiln State Park February 5, 2018
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In which I rant about the failure of good intentions - Agile Software Development.
Podcast from Redhad where the host takes up the millenial's creed - "Diversity, inclusiveness and feelings above all else." You can summize from the title - Command Line Heroes - that her focus is on the empowerment of the team, not the delivery of a product.
Manifesto for Agile Software Development
Agile plays into the values and needs of those born after the turn of the century. These offspring of hippies and mother-led families need special nurturing and have a checklist of words that guide their life; Inclusion, Diversity, Fairness, Feelings and so on. These are not bad values but when they are the focus of your work, rather than the value by you live your life, the work becomes a social mission rather than a commercial success.
"Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software."
Coders lover to code, they hate to document. The Agile developer loves to have constant affirmation and interaction and values this above all else. Stand-ups are daily chances to have your voice heard, even if you have nothing to say. This is their participation ribbon. This too-often empty response replaces thoughtful direction and encourages developers to continue wasting time on their distractions rather than producing product.
Constant promises of 'just over the horizon' features that never actually get implemented.
Documenting your work, whether via a manual or notes embedded in your code, provided a level of completion. It showed the work was thought out, implemented and could be modified in the future. If you code like a distracted kitten, you'll never document your work. You've proven that you're less interested in satisfying your customer and more interested in your personal mission.
Constantly shifting focus, never delivering requirements, never making the product useful via stability or documentation - these are too often the result of adoption of the Agile process. The output from Agile teams becomes, ironically, is more about their process and less about results. There's a language, culture and business around Agile development that ensures a project is never done. For a project like Facebook or Amazon, that makes sense - these are constantly shifting platforms and the ability of features to come and go are necessary. But for an application that needs stability, reliability and completeness, Agile's abandonment of the milestone model for a sprint model produces failure.
Every company I've worked at that dabbled in Agile development failed to deliver the actual product as required. Worse, the product was never finished and never documented so criticism of it was met with either, "Hopefully we'll get that in the next sprint" or "That feature was deemed by the team to be lower priority." The power of the angry or incompetent mob.
Rock Shed Near Limekiln State Park February 5, 2018
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