... Metier?

Couldn't have said it better. In my experience with Agile, I have had great managers who actually use it to push back against their managers. Agile is there to work for us as developers, not to be a yoke. We say what we can fit into a sprint and if some change they want isn't in the scope of that story, it is out. Scope creep is one of the worst things about developing software as the people who aren't working on it everyday come up with new little ideas and tweaks that sometimes aren't simple to implement. This causes delays in deliverables which makes you and your team look bad. It causes delays in features which make the company look bad. It is just a mess. Agile helps with this.

"While you are in there can you do ..." "NO". Agile allows us as developers to say "that 'small change' will take 2 of us 3 weeks to change and test" and then management can decide if that small change is worth the cost of 2 developer salaries for nearly a month.

Agile done right is an amazing tool that we as developers can use to push back on stupid timelines and features. It is all about setting expectations in my eyes.

To be fair though I haven't been exposed to agile done poorly. I could see it being a disaster, but that is like a poorly written program; it is just bad implementation.

Bravo!

I've worked with a lot of these managers that think up a New Top Priority every other day and it's enough to make anyone go crazy. It's even better when you ask them to detail their ideas and they blow you off like they don't have time to think on a "micro level." I would love to know what they learned while getting their MBA's.

Agile is what makes this possible. "Planning? That's not Agile!" "Thinking requirements ahead of time? That's not Agile!"

So you get stakeholders handwaving their requirements "Yeah, I wanna do xyz with a computer" with absolutely no thought to the process of what xyz should be. You can't plan timelines on that, so of course it's wrong and management does what management does and starts demanding 60+ hour work weeks with weekends. Overworked death-marches aren't Agile, either, but that part is conveniently ignored.

You need more upvoats, because this is it, baby.

The problem is that that's incredibly myopic. It's obviously not just about elegance but about functionality. It's not a matter of having a shiny underlying codebase, but robust functionality under that shiny UI layer. People do care about these things but it's more of a longrun issue. We might need to adjust the saying to fool me once.. twice.. 800 times.. shame on you, fool me 801 times - shame on me. I think Windows 10 is a perfect example here. Microsoft began releasing operating systems purely as an iterative means of revenue generation with some major shiny-layer-changes but less and less difference under the hood. By the time they got to Windows 10, they literally could not even get people to install it when it was digitally delivered and free.

And we can see this in nearly every industry. I think the video game industry is a great example here since games have gone from an art to a factory-line level production of focus group iterated mush. The biggest console today is the PS4. It's sold about 40 million units. The PS2, more than a decade earlier, had sold about 50 million units at this time in its life to a much smaller population, and the relative decline there is rapidly increasing. The population part is even more telling. Our population in the US alone since 2000 has increased by nearly 40,000,000 or about 13%. That rapid population growth should be reflected in correspondingly record sales figures for everything, even if they were just breaking even. But we're not seeing that - the case with video games is typical where we're actually seeing many industries in decline. Account for population growth and they're in precipitous decline.

The reason this annoys me so much is because management are supposed to be the longview people. But shareholder syndrome has destroyed this. Shareholders don't care about companies - they care about profit, short term profit. And this interest filters immediately onto the executives and down to management which is completely bastardizing so many industries into timebombs of failure. But immense barriers to competition means even in their decline it's difficult to compete against these sort of companies meaning we see ubiquitous shit everywhere even as it leads to the decline of the peddlers.

My concern if not the crappy consumer apps.

My concern that this crappy code is entering critical systems like industrial complexes, medical machinery, self driving cars, machines that processes food. We are at a time where deteriorated code can actually kill people.

Sales: "We need you to write this super awesome bubbly application that will do absolutely everything the client wants it to do!"

Programmer: "Okay, what does the client want?"

Sales: "We don't know yet!"

Programmer: "...Okay. Can you get back to us when you know what they want?"

Sales: "Yeah, but we need something to show them first!"

Programmer: "Okay, I guess I'll start working on the UI then"

*6 months later*

Programmer: "Okay, I think I'm done with the UI."

Sales: "This UI looks fantastic! The customer loves it!"

Programmer: "Great! Do you know what they want yet?"

Sales: "Nope, still no clue! And the project is due tomorrow!"

Programmer: "..."

Exactly. Agile grew out of 'extreme programming' which grew out of rapid prototyping, which grew out of the observation that usually when you start a software project, you don't know what the hell you're doing. The best way to build a great product is to get hacking, and iterate on what you've got until it becomes awesome. Agile is basically a formalization of this, and it's great for what it's great for.

However, it's a terrible way to build a system when you know from the start what you're building. It's also a terrible (or at least, very expensive) way to build things that aren't just pure software. Like any methodology, it's terrible for the things it's terrible at, and shouldn't be seen as some panacea.

Sadly, in recent years Agile development is seen as the hammer to use for all development nails, and worse, it's been used in half-baked half-arsed implementations by thousands of teams that call what they're doing 'Agile' but are actually just doing shitty programming.

As an aside, though - unit tests (and automated testing in general) is (IMO) the single greatest thing to come out of the software development world in the past decade. It seems like a lot of wasted time and overhead when you start out, but if you expect your software to ever exist beyond version 1.0, it's a small price to pay for free regression testing forever. You know how software gets exponentially harder to maintain as it ages? Automated testing is the way to fix that.

never nailing down your product requirements when you're building the backend of your system.

Hi I've been trying to get a team to do this for seven months now. They want me to write documentation for their backend. They want me to produce tooling for other developers against the backend. They want me to help other developers use the backend. They don't have an API, documentation, a contract, or even a codified design for the backend.

Now, I just agree that it is a good idea to do the things they want me to do, and say that I'll be able to give them a delivery date, as soon as they publish their documentation.

But this isn't really related to the OP, because there is no methodology on this team, least of all agile.

Your comment just hit close to home and I wanted to vent.

*** Waves to the Brexit voters. ***

this is why hipsters shouldn't be coders..

I have to remember this one :-)

How do you feel about making "nightly" or "snapshot" builds publicly available?

Often times, the general public provides a much larger-than-otherwise-feasible user base who is willing to explore real user flows for free.

I have 30 years of software development experience.

You basically invented the design patterns that are no in use but they remodeled in such a way that they became evil.

It is always funny that most young developers >10 years of experience thinks in absolutes.

• Either Waterfall or Agile, they have no concept of in between.
• Either design patterns or total chaos they have no concept of in between.
• Either all services or all local they have no concept of in between.
• Either top don or bottom up they have no concept of in between.

The real issue I have with Agile is not the method itself but that all too often management uses it as an excuse to cover it's own lack of management.

Exactly, or we know it is buggy but we will ship it anyway and fix it later (than never happens)

Clear separation of concerns were most likely not followed and now the monolith becomes the beast that must be fed.

Interesting wording but so true. It actually describes the real situation I experience. Without Agile I was 90% productive, then came rapid release cycles and I became 30% productive. Nowadays it is agile and I became 10% productive. 90% of my time is wasted to fix stuff that I could have fixed months ago by changing a couple of lines.

I actually did not want to choose computer science, but my hobby became my profession by shear accident. I did not find a job and there was this tiny 3 man company that needed someone. And I was not supposed to be a main developer just a code monkey. They had a civil engineer just for that. But he left, and someone had to take it over and so it all started.