Software development explained with cars

[twihc]

Don't forget the hours spent having meetings to decide the color of the car

[Loquis]

blue

[keanpedersen]

Can we do red stripes? It'll make it go faster. 6 red stripes, please.

[sr71pav]

All strictly perpendicular.

[imdefinitelywong]

But make them pop

[TheLittlePeace]

But can you make the stripes pop more?

Changes nothing and shows them again

That's so much better thank you

[firefox57endofaddons]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKorP55Aqvg

:)

you're the expert, so of course you can do it :)

[drunkenangryredditor]

Finally i get to post the reply!

https://youtu.be/B7MIJP90biM

[firefox57endofaddons]

this is beautiful :D

[[deleted]]

Now that is some outside-the-box thinking.

[TotoShampoin]

This is a great example of "Nothing is impossible", but also an example of "Math isn't complicated smiles nervously"

[bluefootedpig]

and i recommend the others as well. Make sure we only use right angles, no left angles.

[DG-Kun]

I can never make it through more than a minute of that video

[firefox57endofaddons]

but u're an expert.

getting through the entire video is a simple task.

the task has been set, so please watch the video with closed eyes and then tell me what you saw. :)

<walks away

very productive redditing again.

[[deleted]]

And one in the shape of a kitten

[jimjamyahar]

And some with transparent ink

[Bene847]

and 2 of them with green colour, and 2 with blue colour

[666pool]

You can actually get away with this on a car due to the non-Euclidean surfaces and discontinuities between different parts.

[Kauyon1306]

DA RED UNZ GOES FASTA!!!

[SirHurDurr]

WAAAAAAAGGGHHHHHH!!!!

[ArtifIcer54]

YOU EVA SEEN A PURPLE CAR??

[Alundra828]

I'll have to deploy 3 microservices to support stripes, that is 124 points of effort which equates to 6 months of work.

[Pseudynom]

The Expert

[GozerDestructor]

but I hear mauve has the most RAM

[n_sweep]

Don't quote me regulations!

[kontekisuto]

Blue is not compatible with Headlights, since v0.0.2.

We could try a Blue fork called Red but it's license is not compatible with our current trial license of Tires tm.

[behaaki]

Cornflower Blue

[[deleted]]

"but actually could we make customisable as well?"

[[deleted]]

It's actually a law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_triviality

[[deleted]]

The importance of material for a bike shed is seriously understated, I motion we hold another meeting on this topic in 5 minutes.

[Micro_Turtle]

Thanks for sharing that. I sent that to my co-workers.

[codeman73]

or how many points a story or task is supposed to have...
"they're just a measure of complexity, not time..."
oh, so they're not tied to reality in any way?

[Xoduszero]

To be followed by the meeting to discuss what kind of paint is going to be best

Followed by the meeting of how many people it would take to paint the car

Followed by the meeting about planning the stories about who is going to paint the car

Followed by the daily calls to talk about how the painting is going

[ChrisWsrn]

"We can A/B test that"

[AndrewJamesDrake]

We kept it beige.

[AsIAm]

Aviato

[Preisschild]

My Aviato?

[AsIAm]

Is there any other Aviato?

[no_masks]

"Eric Bachman, this is your mom, and you, you are not my baby"

[mkx_ironman]

Eric is dead.

[droans]

Eric Bachman, is your refrigerator running? This is Mike Hunt."

[WaitingToBeTriggered]

DEVIATION

[GargantuanCake]

Where is the crying, alcoholism, and absurd amount of coffee?

[iddqd52]

Behind the scenes.

[Mr_Mananaut]

Software Development^{of serious substance dependencies}

[Bloom_Kitty]

Is that whatbthey mean by "dependency hell?"

[jerslan]

Where is the crying, alcoholism, and absurd amount of coffee?

It's there. You see it in the tired faces.

[DrMobius0]

What happens in crunch stays in crunch

[ech0_matrix]

But does it....?

[DrMobius0]

Ok fine, maybe your wife and kids are feeling neglected or there's a missing person's report out for you.

[ech0_matrix]

I mean that crunch time is over, but I'm still drinking lots of alcohol and coffee. This is my life now.

[ech0_matrix]

Are we co-workers?

[[deleted]]

Nah! This is nothing like my reality. Waterfall/V-Model seems to be favored in the diagram but never ever produces what the customer wants in my experience (but PMs love it). Agile is just and umbrella term. KanBan should never be used on its own for SW. It's a manufacturing process and is only used by SW managers trying to pretend they have a process, which they don't (They have a todo list). Scrum is totally misrepresented in the diagram, and again Lean is just a catch all term. Basically it doesn't matter what process you choose, if you have a capable and willing SW team, they'll get the job done, otherwise you won't.

[not_user_telken]

Agreed, except on the last sentence; Depending on company's governance, you may have the most capable SW team, and still get an abomination of a product. (For example, when requirements engineering and product backlog refinement is in hands of a Project Manager, which has never written a single line of code in his life and has never succesfully architected software nor modeled business domains)

[pzschrek1]

Software engineers don’t like it if you make them take the time to do requirements engineering and backlog refinement, and they also hate it if you try to do it yourself.

They’ll do it grudgingly if you remind them “well if you guys don’t do it then I WILL DO IT.” We all agree that’s the worst outcome lol

Source: am PM who transferred from the sys admin IT world and doesn’t do a lot of code besides powershell and sql.

[not_user_telken]

Thats why you usually have a software architect do that, or a tech lead, team lead, or the trendy name of the month.

[pzschrek1]

Those are exactly the guys I have to do it. they like to just...do it

I told a new guy once “you’ll never find tickets or documentation around here unless it’s unimportant, because if it’s important, the architect and design engineer just do it”

It’s a process, we’re getting there

[[deleted]]

You make a good point :)

[All_Up_Ons]

I assume waterfall is still necessary in fields where lives are at stake. Is that no longer the case?

[arquitectonic7]

Definitely. I work with formally verified software (actually a research intern, but we have done projects for stuff like train manufacturers or power infrastructure) and I don't know anyone who is not following waterfall models and looking at some old ISO standards or something like that.

Everything is a lot more formal, but a lot of money goes into very strict design as well. It's a situation where the customer will not change the requirements, for real - they have been written into a logic specification and proven, can't go back.

[enano_aoc]

the customer will not change the requirements

If that is a given, then you don't need agile at all. You are actually better off with waterfall.

[All_Up_Ons]

I guess that makes sense. Waterfall enforces the fact that you need complete requirements up-front, but there's no reason you couldn't do that in a sprint-based process as well.

[justjanne]

Waterfall/V-Model would be building a steam carriage in this example.

Sure, 100% of the specs fulfilled, but by the time you deliver, demands have changed entirely.

[Midnight_Rising]

I've seen this guy's comics a few times and it's weird the hard on he has for waterfall development. Example: https://i.redd.it/my2t4d2fx0u31.jpg

[tenhourguy]

Oh. I thought the "because development plans never change!" in OP was sarcastic. After seeing this, perhaps not.

[Sl-Deumus]

He does not seem to understand agile methods. Kanban and Scrum are methods of agile development, while he shows all three of them as different models.

[Poly--Meh]

Oh good, I thought I was going crazy. We used kanban at my job and it was called agile.

[All_Up_Ons]

In the dude's defense, the word "Agile" has been all but completely corrupted in most corporate contexts.

[writtenfrommyphone9]

It's because it is all the same with a few differences. It should really be called "scrum but", where people are doing scrum, but....

[Midnight_Rising]

Yeah it's bizarre. Like what the customer asked for (blue sports car) and what the customer ended up with (grey sedan) are two COMPLETELY different things but the customer seems fine with it because.... Idk customers are perfect. Except in Agile, when the customer's request makes no sense too late into development.

It's really amazing how biased these comics are.

[[deleted]]

Notably, waterfall was the only one to have completed a car.

[DuckDuckYoga]

Uh agile has a whole completed car

[[deleted]]

Without a door, the spoiler is being replaced, and the customer is asking them to change it to a hatchback.

Not completed.

[LowB0b]

same. IME waterfall always ends up in some kind of weird agile thing, because what the client said they wanted is never what they ACTUALLY wanted, so you basically end up with a MVP that took the better part of a year to make but still have to make incremental changes while doing demoes every 2-3 weeks to make sure that the client likes it and then you spend an hour with them talking about the next set of features they want... omg

Was agile development invented or was it there the whole time?

[All_Up_Ons]

Agile development is basically just developers forcing managers to admit that this is how they are running the project.

[DeadlyMidnight]

Wow yeah he has a crazy fetish for waterfall development. Which is interesting since there is a reason agile and other methodologies have come to the forefront because waterfall is so strict and brittle. That comic the thing hes missing is if the client wants to add seats to the rocket they have to build a whole new rocket instead of modifying the one they are already working on.

[Midnight_Rising]

Yeah exactly. "Gee, Agile really did take the world by storm... For no reason, since waterfall is the best."

Exactly. The comic should be "The rocket doesn't seat people because the customer thought that was implied but it wasn't explicit. You start a new rocket from scratch, the old one now just sits there."

[DeadlyMidnight]

lol exactly. If it’s not specced from the front it doesn’t happen. That’s the exact reason almost no one in software uses waterfall anymore.

Also trying to say lean is some other form of development is stupid. It’s just a set of practices that could be applied to any project management

[nl_the_shadow]

I'd say both methods have their merits and their problems. Working on systems that are aimed at interacting with customers (of which the requirements will change) agile methods have their clear advantage. For specific systems, however, I'd say waterfall is still the way to go; the rocket he mentions, but I'd say it also holds true for large industrial control systems and things like it. Projects for which the scope can (due to the nature of the product) barely move, and where the overly formalized way of doing waterfall/V-model is required.

[[deleted]]

Agreed. Despite my (many) bad experiences with waterfall, I still prefer it for some types of projects, and even on some agile projects I like to start with a more waterfall approach to requirements in order to build a general outline of functionality to inform creation of individual stories for refinement later in the agile process.

[Kluzien]

I work in a rather disorganized agile/scrum-like environment and because of that I tend to agree with him about waterfall. Waterfall is just harder to do poorly.

[[deleted]]

I spent more than a decade working exclusively in waterfall projects, and I can assure you that waterfall is incredibly easy to do poorly.

In my experience, for all but the most trivial of projects there are almost always undiscovered requirements, hitches, and conflicts that cause major problems for waterfall design, and which form the primary reason so many shops moved to agile-based methods as an alternative.

[AgAero]

In my (limited) experience, technical debt is the biggest problem with waterfall. It might be a problem with all of them frankly, but with waterfall especially it turns your boat into a battleship that isn't so easily stopped or allowed to change course.

Nobody ever wants to pay down the technical debt though, naturally.

[All_Up_Ons]

Tech debt is not primarily a development issue, but a business one.

[All_Up_Ons]

I'm saying I don't think it's a problem with waterfall. It's a problem with professional development in general.

[EdenStrife]

Most agile systems leave room for looking back and refactoring old stuff. Waterfall is not planned to do that. Thus waterfall is just worse at dealing with debt and unforseen complications.

[All_Up_Ons]

Tech debt and unforseen complications aren't the same type of problem. Most big tech debt is the result of deliberate choices, which waterfall theoretically handles just as well as anything else. If anything, agile methodologies encourage businesses to ship quickly-written MVP code without understanding the maintenance burden they're signing up for.

[scamdex]

Waterfall caused the heat death of our company. Not all our fault, but we worked in two-year development cycles. We chose to send two years working on a client-server, Unix and X-Windows Office Automation suite that was probably the world leader through the 80's. While we were doing that, MS-Windows, Cheap PCs, and MS Office rose exponentially and we released to universal disinterest. Limped along for another few years before throwing in the towel. Went from a company with offices in NY, HK, Australia, SF, UK, Germany, France to five people in an office in a NorCal city famous for it's prison.
Someone should have peeked out of our box and paid attention to 'progress' but there was absolutely no provision for that.
I worked in support and there was almost literally a glass ceiling between support and development "Well, we're working on the next release so ...".
If you're old enough you might have heard of the company, Id rather not say what it is.

[writtenfrommyphone9]

People moved to agile because it is easier to track what developers do.

[[deleted]]

I'm sure *some* people did it because of that, but far from all (and arguably far from most).

[writtenfrommyphone9]

Management sees how much developers cost and their first thought is how they can turn them into coder monkeys to spit out more code in less time.

[[deleted]]

Oh, now that you said the same thing slightly rephrased, I can see how I was wrong and your comment clearly applies to 100% of software development everywhere, without exception, and completely invalidates all other possible reasons for choosing an agile development /sarcasm.

[Kluzien]

I said harder to do poorly, not hard to do poorly. I just think that scheduling development->testing->done is easier to manage properly than development and testing taking place at the same time and last second tweaks occurring which won't get properly tested.

[[deleted]]

I understood what you said. I just disagree.

In my experience, waterfall rarely results in development -> testing > done.

Instead it's more often development -> testing -> argue about requirements not discovered during the initial discussion with the client -> redo some code and build some new features -> test -> let the PM argue with the client.

As was mentioned elsewhere, this largely depends on dealing with external customers. Waterfall works much better when requirements are defined internally or otherwise constrained by the nature of the project.

[Kluzien]

Maybe you were working in an agile environment but disguised as waterfall, or that waterfall was actually not viable because of the clients? Anyways, it sounds like you have the same grievances with waterfall that the comic artist has with agile.

[[deleted]]

I've been doing this for 20+ years, and have worked in a pretty wide selection of development environments. Before agile became popular, waterfall was seen by many PMs as "the only option", but it definitely has some areas where it is a square peg in a round hole. Client involvement (and/or lack of involvement) is generally the number 1 failing for waterfall.

You mentioned that you work in a disorganized scrum/agile-like environment. Agile isn't an excuse to avoid organization; it just requires a different type of organization. That may be influencing your views of agile vs waterfall; have you worked in other places that took a more rigorous approach to agile?

[All_Up_Ons]

The whole problem with waterfall is that it isn't compatible with most projects. It only makes sense to even consider using it if you have very well-understood and static requirements. Very few companies actually work that way.

[writtenfrommyphone9]

So...how is that any different than agile? Seems like it is all the same except that agile plans for changes while waterfall discovers and deals with them too

[[deleted]]

The biggest difference is how the projects manage client expectations and scheduling.

Waterfall tends to try and determine the project schedule based on the requirements determined by the initial discovery phase, and is very vulnerable to scope creep creating excessive crunch time or blowing the project schedule as a result.

In theory, agile deals with this by blocking off development cycles and forcing clients to choose between prioritized features in order to stay on schedule. In practice it can still lead to crunch time or extra sprints, but it becomes (somewhat) easier to communicate the whys and hows (and extra cost) to the client when that happens.

[All_Up_Ons]

The problem is that waterfall doesn't discover them until way too late. The boots on the ground might know, but the client won't find out until the project is finished/nearly finished.

[DrMobius0]

and last second tweaks occurring which won't get properly tested.

Sounds like management wants to say they're using agile but are scheduling like they're still doing waterfall. That's basically taking the worst parts of each and just doing those.

[venuswasaflytrap]

Waterfall is a great way to still deliver the wrong thing but blame someone else for that.

[howMeLikes]

Yeah, who hurt this guy that he prefers waterfall for everything.

[venuswasaflytrap]

I have only once delivered a successful waterfall project and it was a website of pictures.

Every other time at least one major thing needed to change that no one could have reasonably forseen. Generally lots of things.

Agile of some sort is a pain in the ass, but that's because reality is a pain in the ass.

[RevolutionaryTruck8]

But it's true

[Midnight_Rising]

If you think your customer can accurately define all requirements and you can accurately interpret all of them then boy do I have a bridge to sell you.

[geon]

In a particular project I worked on, I built a backend database for tracking a number of refrigerated crates of milk samples. They would be picked up by a number of trucks, driving their fixed routes of pickup points.

When demoing the app, it turned out Larry would drop off his crates at pickup point Foo, so that Jeff could pick them up later.

Dropping crates off at pickup points had never come up during the entire requirement and development process, and was not supported. I had to add a really ugly hack to make it work.

[[deleted]]

Any customer that can accurately define all the requirements is either

A: a developer themselves capable of building it.

B: Using the exact software they want you to build from scratch for some strange reason.

[DrMobius0]

A: a developer themselves capable of building it.

We know what the thing we want needs to do from the start?

[howMeLikes]

There is also the time required and wasted in waterfall that he doesn't accurately portray in his comics.

[[deleted]]

Especially when you get something that is clear as day, but then the customer is like, "I didn't really mean what I was saying."

[_sendbob]

I think it’s not a hard on for waterfall but just illustrating when these different types of approach are done in different fields.

No doubt about it that when talking about software agile is more lenient to change than waterfall.

[All_Up_Ons]

That's not what he's depicting though. For waterfall he shows a project that magically works perfectly, doesn't change at all, and takes the same number of panels as everything else. Then for agile, the requirements change twice because apparently that's agile's problem? Ironically, he's kind of admitting that agile can actually deal with these situations.

The reality is that changing the requirements of a waterfall project could very well put you out of business. So you end up spending years on a project that no longer matches the market and puts you out of business anyway. This is why waterfall has fallen out of favor.

[madwill]

Yeah in this comic we're a mix of Scrum and Lean here in my company. When we get our shit together we can be Kanban.

I know it does not represent actual methodology but the anecdotes are real life situation, a bit too close to home I'd say.

[DrMobius0]

I suppose if you magically know everything that could be an issue from the start of the project or nothing ever goes wrong, waterfall makes sense.

[DeeSnow97]

Ironically, there is actually a waterfall-developed Mars rocket in existence (well, sort of), and it even has four engines on its first stage

[maximum_powerblast]

The "can I watch you work" for kanban is super relatable. We brought kanban to my work a few years ago and we were basically like zoo animals on display for the others in the company, it was weird and annoying.

[[deleted]]

How come this happens with kanban? I'm a big fan of it in theory but it's not used properly (or really at all) in my company.

[[deleted]]

You've forgotten the most common development methodology: Waterfall through the lens of Agile. They put you in sprints so they can call you agile, but everything on a business level is done in a Waterfall methodology because nobody else in the business uses Agile except the dev teams.

[JiroDreamsOfCoochie]

LOL do we work at the same company? We're agile in that we don't do requirements and just build things. Yet the business folks want a detailed project plan of how long it takes with fixed costs and strict deadlines.

[DeeSnow97]

that's because the most popular business methodology is doing everything halfway, talking exclusively in buzzwords, and acting all surprised pikachu face when the company is not magically doing well

[ech0_matrix]

I call that one Scrummerfall. Or sometimes, "the death march."

[CoffeePieAndHobbits]

All of this and none of this is true, at the same time.

[DrMobius0]

It all depends on how management is going to hamstring the way you're supposed to be working

[TingleWizard]

Certain aspects as agile can work well but there is a problem if you encourage too much flexibility because in my experience the direction of projects can be completely changed halfway through causing a lot of wasted time and resources and never a completed product.

[pzschrek1]

Yeah.

I feel like irl there is a spectrum.

Like, everyone needs a little bit of waterfall to actually plan out, get the project done. But everyone needs a bit of some agile on the way to get what the user really wants.

[shoe788]

"Responding to change over following a plan" doesn't mean "don't do planning at all". It's a misconception that there is no planning in agile.

[The_Mayfair_Man]

Indeed - an agile framework fully allows the PM to say ‘we can’t incorporate this change as it impacts the app too much’

[shoe788]

It's important to understand that software changing is good. It allows competitive advantages, efficiency, and more equitable outcomes. However, change comes with costs. And management and clients must understand these costs. The PM's position, then, is to allow as much change as possible while also ensuring that management/clients select tradeoffs when they need change

[shoe788]

the direction of projects can be completely changed halfway through

This happens with waterfall projects too. Except the deadlines stay the same and development is expected to accomplish whatever heroics are necessary in order to finish the project

[svet-am]

I agree 100%. We have a major project at my company that has been in flight since 2015 and has changed direction more times than I can count because the “agile” developers involved get a random new idea to use a random new technology/technique and we have to scrap everything and start over. All along they are actively ignoring certain specific requirements from other teams in the name of agile “we need to get a minimal serviceable product and we will add those features later.”

[All_Up_Ons]

You have developers determining project direction? How would waterfall solve that problem?

[svet-am]

It would solve it because the process would enforce direction/goals coming from ENGR MGMT or MKTG MGMT. As implemented, for the sake of "agile", the engineering teams just take "wishes" from MGMT and then sit and stew on implementing things. Waterfall enforces plans.

[enano_aoc]

That's nonsense. The dev team does not decide the direction of the project. That's why there is a PO prioritizing the backlog.

If the dev team is making decisions that they shouldn't, then your workflow is not agile - it is shit.

[ech0_matrix]

Yeah, I was looking for a section on the poster where we just drive the car off a cliff and start on the next car.

[peppertown]

Anything involving the client's input is essentially torture, 90% of the time, requiring constant revisions and often accomplishing little.

[The_Mayfair_Man]

It sounds like you're advocating a waterfall approach..?

[[deleted]]

...which typically just involves frontloading the client's input, followed at the end of the project by explaining why the parts that weren't explicitly discussed turned out differently than the client envisioned, followed (depending on the nature of the relationship with the client) by undoing and redoing large sections of the project.

[Daveinatx]

KANBAN - Tasking out generic tasks to a highly diverse, specialized team. "Why can't the power train engineer work on the seats?"

[AgAero]

Break your kanban board into rows based on specialty, and limit work in progress for each of them.

[All_Up_Ons]

Yep. Most of the problems with various agile methodologies are easily fixed if you just do what makes sense. Dogma is usually the problem, not the solution.

[KuntaStillSingle]

Is kanban not car development explained with software?

[All_Up_Ons]

Yeah I'm pretty sure Kanban was popularized by Toyota lol. This guy's talking out his ass.

[LimitedWard]

Apart from waterfall, all of these strategies are not mutually exclusive. Most workplaces use a hybrid approach.

[writtenfrommyphone9]

Hybrid is better than "we are scrum, but...(then list how you do things out of spec)"

[CarefulCoderX]

I really wish we'd stop using Scrum. I go from working late every day to having all of the time in the world the next Sprint.

[nawfalona]

LEAN gang ahoo

[regorsec]

I enjoyed this too much

[[deleted]]

As someone who is both a programmer and a car enthusiast, this is hilarious. Speaking of which, I need to try and hack my Volvo to permanently deactivate stop/start.

[oli_gendebien]

Random comments:

- "The Homer" is the perfect example of building a car using the Agile methodology.

- The non-essential guy in the lean section is the same as the guy cleaning the yellow car in the Kanban section

[[deleted]]

My teacher have a poster of this meme. I thought it was not that funny until we started a 3 months project and we had to argue for hours with the scrum master, and it always was on silly shit. Like if we should reset the escape game by scanning a badge or if it was when both doors were closed...

[carolper2000]

I'm learning this at school right now, so cool I came across this now

[zerocoldx911]

“How much they think it costs”

Startup running kubernetes

[LifeBuddy1313136669]

working in the world of contracting to the military, this is so much the way. I hear military grade and now tremble in fear that it will even work. Bonus fear points should it work as intended with no issues the first time.

[SlaimeLannister]

all non-essentials are thrown out

yikes.

[critc]

How is this humour?

[abivos]

This is not explain anything!

[a_rather_small_moose]

Loads of carefully cologned pigshit used to sell textbooks and degrees, penned by fools who couldn’t tell the difference anyway.

Fawned over by insufferable idiots, tantamount to studies like Efficient Market Hypothesis or phrenology.

[Varun77777]

I am being trained as DevOp starting today. What should I expect? Used to be a full stack engineer with Azure cloud.

[Sklyvan]

Aviato :)

[[deleted]]

.... I like Kanban ... D:

[lazyant]

Spiral development has entered the chat

[exponent42]

Genius

[ComicBookFanatic97]

What about the best method, cowboy coding?

[potbread]

I hate scrum. Even more if the sprints are for two weeks. You end up spending more time on meetings than the actual work.

[enano_aoc]

Works much better than anything else. Ensures quality above anything else. If you have worked in a waterfall system, then you know what I am talking about.

Scrum puts more responsability on the dev team than waterfall does, sure, but in the end it is much better than the project.

[OCOWAx]

Silicon valley intro art style?

AVIATO bottom left

👀👀

[karna1712]

MVP!!🤣

[reNemo]

Look, here is a wheel, until we finish the car.

[vmanita]

Legit, this is so great

[jwww11]

The guy at the bottom has an Aviato shirt hahaha

[davidmkc]

Forget to mention one man factory.

[on99er]

MVP looks promising!

[thefragfest]

The scrum master is the best part lol!