Why “Agile” and especially Scrum are terrible

Michael O. Church ^ | 6/6/2015 | michaelochurch

[Mariner]

I’ve been managing IT projects for decades.

I’ve never seen Agile/Scrum deliver anything real. Not once.

When it looks like it has delivered it’s because the people on the team decided to get things done in spite of the “non-process” process.

And human nature being what it is, each new scrum is less and less ambitious until people start celebrating the achievement of nothing.

[nhbob1]

Its a lot of fun having a Scrum on a Telecon with engineers on the other side of the globe where the combination of audio quality and heavily accented broken English make it virtually impossible to understand what is being said

[AnotherUnixGeek]

Agile is supposed to be a development methodology, not a project management methodology. Too often, Agile becomes an excuse to avoid realistic effort estimation, and then you end up with the same frenzy near development close that you get with badly managed waterfall projects (though I’ve noticed even in bad Agile projects, you have fewer required new features for the first patch than in waterfall). Ideally, you size the project realistically and deliver iterations which work and which meet some part of what your end-user wants now, not what he wanted 6 months ago.

[AppyPappy]

IT management has to justify themselves somehow

[AppyPappy]

IT projects are doomed by two things:

Arbitrary due dates set by people who have no idea how long something will take to develop

Enhancements and bug fixes that need to be done “yesterday”

[RFEngineer]

“I’ve never seen Agile/Scrum deliver anything real. Not once.”

hilarious....my experience has been that its what you call unstructured software development when you run out of other things to call it.

“im not just hacking out lines of code with no collaboration or structure, its “agile” development!”

[econjack]

I think the requirements were well-specified, since I wrote them myself. My company sold programmer tools (e.g., compilers, linkers, assemblers, editors) and a statistics package, not custom software. Our code reviews were such that we might have 2 or 3 a month.

[RitchieAprile]

Interesting that you should mention IT management and Agile
in the same sentence. The personification of this is the so-called “Kanban” board which management can use as a club
when the colored markers don’t move fast enough. It seems as if they are hypnotized by them, as if they all represent the same size chunks of work. Sometimes a user story is really a multi chapter epic.

[mfish13]

So did I.

[Red Badger]

Kinda like Communism..............

[numberonepal]

But don’t you love it when they call a ‘bug report’ a ‘user story’?

As a development manager I'd like to have my fu**ing requirements and UX in a timely manner that makes sure there is adequate dev and QA time to meet the impossible release date.

[stylin19a]

two women can have a baby in 4.5 months.

[SeeSharp]

I think the root of most of these problems stems from the fact that IT professionals are a bit like lawyers. Management needs us and can't function without us - and for this they hate us. After all, nothing annoys a fifty-something senior vice president more than a twenty-something from the IT department telling him what his boundaries are.

To make matters worse, the Internet has introduced an entirely new dimension to the problem of how IT professionals deal with users. I came up in a world where we always dealt with either accounting types or engineering types. Everybody we dealt with was at least educated in some form of mathematical reasoning. So even when we disagreed we could all still at least understand each other's arguments. But come the Internet, now we have to deal with sales and marketing types as well. Nothing could be more alien to a programmer than people who literally get paid to sit around thinking up new and different ways to do the exactly same things.

[Harmless Teddy Bear]

But what about Mobile and Hostile?

[dirtboy]

But come the Internet, now we have to deal with sales and marketing types as well. Nothing could be more alien to a programmer than people who literally get paid to sit around thinking up new and different ways to do the exactly same things.

I work in marketing systems. It can drive a rigorous mind batty. We had a developer from Russia who used to be a physics professor and he was having a hard time understanding why we did what we did. I finally pulled him aside and told him this wasn't Newtonian physics, but quantum mechanics. A light bulb went off and he functioned much better after that.

[SubMareener]

What you described is a rational development process with the actual “magic bullet” : paying attention. You did not describe learning about all the new jargon involved in Agile Development. So good for you!

[carolinablonde]

It goes even deeper than that. For example, too many companies (mine included) keep attempting outsourcing despite past failures at attempting such. I have a mantra - mistakes are expensive - learn from them. But a new executive comes on board and believes he/she is smarter than the last one, and the last attempt failed due to poor execution, rather than being a bad idea in the first place.

That sounds exactly like what's going on in my company right now. (Maybe we work for the same company, who knows?) I'm just hoping I can hang on for about 6 more years until I can retire.

[numberonepal]

I believe this stuff is snake oil.

Agile and the "shared collaborative work space" are both a bill of goods. Agile can work, but everyone (including business) has to be on board. My biggest issue as that business requirements never have a cutoff because Agile. The entire release cycle has to be Agile for it to properly work. I'm not sure it can EVER work in an Enterprise environment, however. It always turns waterfall-ish in the end.

As for the 2020 shared work space, my devs hate it. They hate everything about it. I hate it because calls are never ever quiet. There is always background noise that hinders communication (especially when dealing with accents). For someone to go heads down into code is very difficult in this environment. Sounds are distracting, but visual (especially peripheral stimuli) are extremely counterproductive to work that requires focus and concentration.

Further, a fully collaborative environment has NO PRIVACY! I'm not saying a cube is totally private, but you do at least get to turn your back on the rest of the world. There's no way to personalize your work space. This leads to a lack of morale - not good. This lack of privacy also leads to high school-ish clique type behavior. The cool kids congregate and even save stations for their clique. The possibility for conflict increases to levels that are unacceptable to me.

[KC_Conspirator]

Usually when I work on an agile project, its "agile lite".

And yes, the waterfall method is a strawman.

[bar sin·is·ter]

“As a development manager I’d like to have my fu**ing requirements and UX in a timely manner that makes sure there is adequate dev and QA time to meet the impossible release date.”

This is where Agile can fall apart, artifacts like UX are also iterative in nature and need to be determined way ahead of time prior to starting development work. As for release dates, if the expectation is that you are required to deliver all features at that time, then you’re doing agile wrong. Essentially your mixing a waterfall release schedule with an agile development process which can be a recipe for failure.

In defense of managers however, I have dealt with many development managers who continually demanded more funding to deliver functionality but continued to deliver a shitty product no matter how much funding we provided (reminds me of teachers unions) and then wondered why they were always questioned.

In order for any process to work, first and foremost, it requires competent people on all sides.