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• agile turned into a rigid methodology that sucked the life out of our best devs,

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This is one of the biggest problems. If it's treated as a framework that's malleable, it can be good. Rigid application, especially if someone is trying to use it on operations teams, will kill productivity. Also, some groups use it as an excuse to say No, when they really just don't want to do the work. The other problem is when it's used for management insight and tracking rather than it being used solely for a team to be able to plan out work. Those two combined make it a poison pill for organizations.

Agile is the worst way to develop anything. It's bandaids atop bandaids and a lot of effort calming "feelings" and such. But if you're billing by the hour, you'll love the $$$!

mickeyrig06sq3 said:

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• agile turned into a rigid methodology that sucked the life out of our best devs,

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This is one of the biggest problems. If it's treated as a framework that's malleable, it can be good. Rigid application, especially if someone is trying to use it on operations teams, will kill productivity. Also, some groups use it as an excuse to say No, when they really just don't want to do the work. The other problem is when it's used for management insight and tracking rather than it being used solely for a team to be able to plan out work. Those two combined make it a poison pill for organizations.

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I haven't done Agile (but I've read up on it).

It reminds me of when I was a job shopper at Lockheed Aero in FTW...

We got sucked into Fagan Inspection training.

The main thing they emphasized was that you could only inspect 250 lines of code at a time and the whole process took basically 4 hrs.

I told my boss it was bull**** and he said we had to follow the policy. So...I showed him that I had changed about 5000 lines of code because of a lot of variable name changes in addition to the actual code changes.

When he realized it would take 10 days of 4 people to go through the code line by line, he realized it was bull**** too...

I'm guessing a ****load of people are scrubbing any reference to "scrum master" from their resumes.

It's designed to deliver "poorly". I think there is no getting around properly defining the problem to solve, requirements needed, and then taking a well thought out approach to get there. Not stacking half-assery together. And I'm not an IT guy. I'm the finance business partner that in my 30 year career has been around long enough to see many forms of "agile" executed by many different IT folks. They all under-deliver and then suck to maintain

Explain Agile for the retired guys.

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Agile development is like any other business methodology, it can be done well, or it can be done poorly.

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It's easier to run agile in an environment with repetitive work elements. I saw it work well in a documentation development team at Boeing...the doc types were limited and the content was easy to compartmentalize.

otoh, every other agile environment I was in got wrapped around the axle - too much time and energy went to serving the process and not the goal.

Agile is an cult. Good intentions but implementation almost never works and everyone blames themselves for not succeeding, not the cult as that would be sacrilegious.

About 7 years ago, I joined a new company where Agile was the religion followed. In my introduction meeting, I talked about my experience and then said our focus must be the product and meeting the needs of the customer and nothing else. A project manager who was worshipped at the altar of Agile took offense and complained to his boss who complained to my boss that I was not "on board" with Agile and that I believed in Product Requirement Documents rather than just throwing things in a JIRA ticket. My boss then said it was better to send an apology email that I did believe in Agile etc etc which I eventually did.

The Agile cultists are crazy and worse than Jihadis.

Over_ed said:

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https://www.asatunews.co.id/en/fidelity-investments-job-cuts-reorganization#:~:text=Fidelity%20Investments%20announced%20on%20Thursday,technology%20and%20product%20operating%20model.

We all have pet peeves, and I suspect those of us who work (or worked) in tech have more than our share. Near the top of my bad list is agile development. Daily stand ups, scrum masters, haggling over story points... bleh

The short of it -

• agile turned into a rigid methodology that sucked the life out of our best devs,
• set low expectations, and
• tended to break tasks into 2-week chunks that greatly limited speed/scope in favor of being sure to finish in our allotted 2-week "sprint".

Agile also added a whole hierarchy of non-developers to manage the Agile process, rather than create real value.

In any case, Fidelity is stepping away from Agile, and these layoffs seem to be those guys and gals. I suspect this change is a result of AI and wanting to innovate continuously on a larger scale.

Good on Fidelity for recognizing Agile has never been agile. Hopefully the better ones let go can pick up with AI tools now and add real value value themselves.

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and "ceremonies" like "backlog grooming", Sprint Planning, Daily Stand-up, Sprint Review, and Sprint Retrospectives....

Every few weeks people fight about this. Then engineering teams always say the acceptance criteria isn't good enough

......too much time and energy went to serving the process and not the goal.

jja79 said:

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Explain Agile for the retired guys.

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It tries to quantify the amount of work a team can do in a certain timeframe, then using that, try to plan their workload within a certain period. The goal is basically to allow teams to plan their work based on their historical average work. 99% of the time it fails to be work. Kinda like communism; in theory it works, but human nature makes it faceplant.

Software can be difficult to estimate and plan, and oftentimes gives stakeholders no indication of issues until late into the process, so agile development basically breaks up projects into 2 week (usually) chunks called "sprints".

Each sprint has deliverables from the team and the stakeholders have visibility as to the progress and issues that come up as they arise. Well done, it allows for reaching milestones with evaluations where you could end up with a much different, but more effective, final product based in midstream adjustment opportunities.

Done poorly, it is just a regular project with a bunch of extra meetings.

mickeyrig06sq3 said:

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jja79 said:

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Explain Agile for the retired guys.

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It tries to quantify the amount of work a team can do in a certain timeframe, then using that, try to plan their workload within a certain period. The goal is basically to allow teams to plan their work based on their historical average work. 99% of the time it fails to be work. Kinda like communism; in theory it works, but human nature makes it faceplant.

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Exactly.

And like Islam, it is never Islam's fault that it failed. Failure is because its adherents were not Muslim enough. Same way the if the project fails, it is not because Agile had a problem it is because people weren't Agile enough. Like Muslims, no one knows what Agile actually says and people fight about it. Then they come up with words like "Agilish" and "waterfallish" which causes more confusion.

There are even 25 year old fresh out of school "Agile Evangelists" who have never written a line of code in their lives but will tell you, a 20 year software vet how to manage your projects.

You will be amazed how militant the Agile pimps get. I almost got canceled at a new company I joined some years ago.

Why I am not an Agile evangelist
Sofia Woloschin
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-i-am-agile-evangelist-sofia-woloschin-pmp-csm-pmi-acp-icp-acc/

I have used variations of Agile successfully at several companies. Never had or needed a scrum master.
Agile tries to solve several problems that plague non Agile development.. biggest one is estimating time taken for a project

If you haven't solved an engineering problem before there is absolutely no way you can tell how long it's going to take. What usually happens is business leaders and execs pick dates out of their ass and try to get Dev teams to conform to those dates and call it accountability. Seen enough of this bull**** from leaders.

You have better luck doing that with Agile. SpaceX adopts an Agile approach vs Boeing and NASA, and that's allowed them quick iterative development.

Agile is not a panacea but I've seen it work a lot better than any other methodology. Then again, I've never used Agile for the sake of being agile - used 4 different variations at 4 different companies adapting what made sense for each one.

I will say waterfall development is by far the worst development style. We had two 'business analysts' spend a year interviewing stakeholders and writing requirements during bi-weekly meetings. Then the lead 'business analyst' left for another job and nobody could find her notes and we started all over with 9 more months of requirement development. In the end we cancelled the project after spending $400k and never wrote a single line of code.

Waterfall just means nobody knew the developers had the completely wrong idea what the requirements were until the day their finished project is handed over for acceptance

All you need is a "common sense" approach. Anyone who follows a methodology without thinking it through and know why or why not, is a rank idiot.

I've met enough of such idiots in my career. Even CEOs.

About 12 years ago, I was at a small company which eventually failed. I left. They then fired the CEO and got another chap - an Agile evangelist. He brought in his CTO who was another Agile nutjob. My friend who was still at the company would tell me that at all-hands meetings, that is all that these 2 clowns would talk about - Agile agile agile. He didn't stop to think that no client has ever paid a $ of revenue just because one was "agile". Their website had agile all over the place. He promised great things now that they were agile. What happened? In a year they ended up selling the company and the CEO and his buddy decamped to another company soon enough.

deddog said:

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I have used variations of Agile successfully at several companies. Never had or needed a scrum master.
Agile tries to solve several problems that plague non Agile development.. biggest one is estimating time taken for a project

If you haven't solved an engineering problem before there is absolutely no way you can tell how long it's going to take. What usually happens is business leaders and execs pick dates out of their ass and try to get Dev teams to conform to those dates and call it accountability. Seen enough of this bull**** from leaders.

You have better luck doing that with Agile. SpaceX adopts an Agile approach vs Boeing and NASA, and that's allowed them quick iterative development.

Agile is not a panacea but I've seen it work a lot better than any other methodology. Then again, I've never used Agile for the sake of being agile - used 4 different variations at 4 different companies adapting what made sense for each one.

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Agile is just a system meant to be applied across the entire board. Those who can't adapt it to work for them are the problem at heart. Even if it is just recognizing it is not needed for them. The other problem though, is that it is also a sales pitch. I know because I went into that world of scrum when I was double hatting in PM.

Agile came around at the peak of the PM craze. When tiktokers were raving about this "six figure job with no job requirements". It became the learn to code meme but like, actually. HUGE influx of new people with little to no training or experience and all these companies delivering learning packages on Agile went ham. So a herd of randos got all these certs and titles and clung to them desperately because it's all they had. That's where the cult is. You badmouth Agile, you badmouth their entire professional existence. And as adverts to a cult, they are rigid and bound to the Word of Agile in all ways creating insane inflexibility which tanks projects all the time. Seen it happen first hand, more than once.

Being 69 has its downside but never setting the alarm (unless the tee time is early), playing golf every day, never having another meeting and being able to forget what you just explained (thanks for that) are all positives.

Nailed it

BigRobSA said:

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DannyDuberstein said:

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Agile leads you down the road to having a bunch of inadequate solutions that are also band-aided together, and all of the issues and headaches that come with that. It should just be called "half-ass"

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Yep

It's the Lean Six Sigma of IT/tech

L6S....also worthless

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Six Sigma according to The Dilbert Principle.

Step 1: Gather lots of information
Step 2: Ignore it

We fixed the keg said:

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......too much time and energy went to serving the process and not the goal.

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Much like the dumbass 6 Sigma *****..

Not a fan of agile development model. Ugh! It reminds me of HR's endless quest to make our quarterly and annual reviews more complicated than they need to be because "this is awesome and we want you to experience the awesome"

I can't retire soon enough.

Ag with kids said:

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We got sucked into Fagan Inspection training.

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My first job out of A&M called us into a meeting for "Fagan Inspection" training. This was in 1999. Some dude called Michael Fagan started this. What a waste of time. They made us sit through weeks of training. Fagan made a lot of money fooling companies.

Ag with kids said:

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Principal Uncertainty said:

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BigRobSA said:

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DannyDuberstein said:

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Agile leads you down the road to having a bunch of inadequate solutions that are also band-aided together, and all of the issues and headaches that come with that. It should just be called "half-ass"

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Yep

It's the Lean Six Sigma of IT/tech

L6S....also worthless

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Six Sigma according to The Dilbert Principle.

Step 1: Gather lots of information
Step 2: Ignore it

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TQM = Total Quality Management..

ha ha I worked at that company that had all that nonsense. The late 90s and early 00s were an interesting time.

The other bs I remember was "Learning Maps". They'd force all employees in a room and put something that looked like children's play map in front of them and teach us some make-believe nonsense.

flakrat said:

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Not a fan of agile development model. Ugh! It reminds me of HR's endless quest to make our quarterly and annual reviews more complicated than they need to be because "this is awesome and we want you to experience the awesome"

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The only thing I like about Agile is the concept that we can see a somewhat working product early in the process, not in 2 years. So requirement writing doesn't take years, by which time the market would have moved on. You are more likely to be in time with a product that works just enough and launch. The 2 week sprints are also a good idea in general.

The problem is it gives engineering teams too much power and they have good reason to blame everyone else but themselves.

Ag with kids said:

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We fixed the keg said:

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......too much time and energy went to serving the process and not the goal.

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Much like the dumbass 6 Sigma *****..

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I think 6 Sigma had levels of experts like in Karate or Taekwondo.... I don't remember what they are called, like "Sensei" or something.

The problem is when companies think they can "democratize" software to everyone. They basically want more labor so invent these ways to pull everyone in. In the early days it was for real smart people. Now any immigrant wife can join as a scrum master and enforce "rituals" and become a girlboss.

infinity ag said:

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TQM = Total Quality Management..

ha ha I worked at that company that had all that nonsense. The late 90s and early 00s were an interesting time.

The other bs I remember was "Learning Maps". They'd force all employees in a room and put something that looked like children's play map in front of them and teach us some make-believe nonsense.

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Many years ago, my team was responsible for scheduling small group lunches with our CEO, where he would talk informally about issues, ideas, etc. with 10-12 rank and file employees.

He was just beginning to get interested in TQM and he would often pepper his discussions with lingo.

Someone at one of the lunches brought up some idea by saying "it would be great if we could yada, yada, yada." And before he could finish his thought, the CEO yelled out "What's your cost of quality on that?"

Everyone jumped. He scared the crap out of all of us, and the guy, who had no answer, just kind of sat there.

Killed the whole vibe.

I still yell "What's the cost of quality on that?" sometimes, randomly.