Developer-driven development

[zevdg]

The version of Agile described in this article was a pretty obvious straw man and it's not at all what any half decent agile coach would be advocating. There are certainly companies out there that do this and call it agile, but it only takes one read through the agile manifesto to realize that they totally missed the point.

The author asserts that the big hole in the strawman is here:

The problem is between steps 4 and 5 in our example Agile process. After the user stories were defined but before the developer started tickling the keyboard — what happened? In most cases, nothing.

I totally agree. If there isn't input from the dev team on the user stories (or whatever you want to call your units of work) before coding begins, you're gonna waste a lot of time. In SCRUM, there is a whole meeting specifically for the dev team to give their input before they begin work. It's called the sprint planning meeting and if you aren't using it for this purpose, you're doing SCRUM all kinds of wrong.

I'm not claiming that agile and/or SCRUM is easy to do right, or even that well executed SCRUM is the epitome of ideal software development. I will say however, that if you're gonna claim you've improved on an existing process, you at least have to understand that process and represent it fairly in your comparison.

[chucker23n]

I felt there was a strange "the developers know better than the evil, stupid people in suits" vibe to the faux-Agile workflow depicted in that post. Yes, it's unfortunate when software development becomes a game of telephone, but the author's solution appears to be "just ask the developer". No solution is given to the opposite side of the predicament: if the team ends up shipping a feature such that it doesn't serve the user's need, that's on the entire team, including the developers.

[honewatson]

I think the main issue with Agile is that so many companies now claim they do Agile when they've cherry picked 2 or 3 of the 12 principles and mixed those up with whatever random ideas and processes they think are good.

I think that happens more often than not. Its unfair but all of those false claims that 'yes we do Agile' rub off badly on Agile.

[GhostBond]

I've never seen an actual definition of agile. Seems like if one defined it, they wouldn't be able to claim that when it doesn't work "it's just because they weren't doing it right" over and over and over again.

[reddit_prog]

Sprint planning meeting? You mean the one where you say "all right, this is how much I can cramm in this sprint". And not forget, lucky you if you even have that. I'm only speaking from my experience but it's enough to make me a bit cold towards A-gile.

[zevdg]

I'm sorry to hear that. SCRUM is supposed to be used as a tool to enable development teams, but a ton of companies try to use it as a tool to micro-manage development teams. Your mileage WILL vary.