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Brickardo ,

Fun mental exercise - remove the formalism behind agile methodologies out of software development. How is that any different from driving another human being mad?

I have altered the specifications. Play I do not alter them any further.

kaffiene ,

I'm always sceptical about results like these. I was told that waterfall always failed when I'd worked on successful waterfall projects with no fails.
The complaints about waterfall were exaggerated as I think are complaints about agile. The loudest complaints seem to always be motivated by people trying to sell sonething

zalgotext ,

My crazy wacko conspiracy theory - software development is just a really weird discipline, most of the people in the field are bad at it, and it doesn't have the same amount of standardization and regulation that other engineering fields have, so doing it "right" looks a lot fuzzier than doing, say, civil engineering "right".

The biggest thing though is that most people are bad at it. It's really hard to evaluate high level organizational concepts like waterfall vs. agile when we still have developers arguing over the usefulness of unit tests.

AnalogyAddict ,

I think it's more that they are trying to solve the problem by changing the dev team processes, when the biggest factor of success is developing the RIGHT thing. But since most tech managers have risen up from the ranks of devs, and they have a hard time understanding that other people have valuable skills they don't, they have no idea how to hire good designers and refuse to listen to them when they happen to get one.

kaffiene ,

I so agree with you. Especially that software engineering is not like actual engineering. Ironically that's the first point of the agile manifesto - is all about the people and interactions, not the tools and processes. That's why I'm leery about these grand claims about agile failures when half the time they mean scrum and just doing scrum isn't agile (see point one of the manifesto)

Ilflish ,

Ignoring the success and failure of agile and waterfall. Waterfall was just a way more enjoyable development experience for me. That would probably change if the cycle was lower though. Also doesn't help that many managers I've had don't follow the rules of agile/SCRUM. Seems like people use it as an excuse to be able to change things on any given day but those cycles are supposed to be planned, not the plans.

kaffiene ,

Yeah actually i hadn't thought about that aspect of it, but I did enjoy waterfall projects much more.

dan ,
@dan@upvote.au avatar

Oh well, time to switch back to the waterfall model I guess

lol, no.

werefreeatlast ,

Not gonna read it because we, elsewhere in engineering land, have been forced to eat Agile shit from the water hose to make us better and faster. Fucking hell! I can't re-compile a mirror if it comes out wrong!

I hope "New Impact" includes hammers.

Cosmicomical ,

It seems very biased to say the least. A title like that would be ok if it was comparing agile to pre-existing models like waterfall. A valid title for this would have been "new sw development methodology seems to have a much lower failure rate than agile dev. "

ALSO I would like to see the experiment repeated by independent researchers.

jj4211 ,

"new sw development methodology seems to have a much lower failure rate than agile dev, claims people who stand to make money if new sw development methodology has a lower failure rate. "

cheddar ,
@cheddar@programming.dev avatar

Today, new research conducted for a new book, Impact Engineering, has shown that 65% software projects adopting Agile requirements engineering practices fail to be delivered on time and within budget, to a high standard of quality. By contrast, projects adopting a new Impact Engineering approach detailed in a new book released today only failed 10% of the time.

All you need to know about this study.

Simplicity ,

It almost sounds like a project team that is actually and actively looking to solve known and recurring problems instead of "just do whatever everyone else is kind of doing" might be why they are successful.

It's the difference between "how should we go about this" vs "see how we go" regardless of what you label those approaches as.

jj4211 ,

I think the take away should be:

new research conducted for a new book, Impact Engineering,

By contrast, projects adopting a new Impact Engineering approach detailed in a new book released today only failed 10% of the time.

So the people who want to sell you 'Impact Engineering' say 'Impact Engineering' is better than Agile.... Hardly an objective source.

Even if they have success with their 'Impact Engineering' methodology, the second it becomes an Agile-level buzzword is the second it also becomes crap.

The short of the real problem is that the typical software development project is subject to piss poor management, business planning, and/or developers and that piss poor management is always looking for some 'quick fix' in methodology to wave a wand and get business success without across the board competency.

Simplicity ,

Oh yeah. I totally agree that the source has its own objective. I wasn't supporting their specific approach at all.

You are right that the key take away is somene saying "I think my own idea, which I happen to be selling a book about, is great, here are some stats that I have crafted to support my own agenda"

The point I was making was simply that people who care enough to try something, anything, with thought (like looking for a new methodology to try out) are likely to be more successful.

Like a diet. The specific one doesn't matter so much. It's the fact that you are actually paying attention and making a specific effort.

Beetschnapps ,

Move fast and break shit!

echodot ,

Isn't it more that people tend to use agile as an excuse for not having any kind of project plan.

It'd be interesting to know how many of those agile projects actually had an expert project lead versus just some random person who was picked who isn't actually experienced in project management.

barryamelton ,

In my experience It's not about a project plan for features, but actually doings things correctly instead of doing the minimum to finish what you need to do on the current sprint.

masquenox ,

Isn’t it more that people tend to use agile as an excuse for not having any kind of project plan.

I'd say it's more about continuously milking customers on projects that never seem to end. I've never done software project management, but I have seen it's "tenets" applied to other types of projects. The results were arduous - to say the least.

echodot ,

I've seen it being done even on internal projects though. Things within an organization.

It tends to be that they start developing a feature and then someone comes along and says, ooh wouldn't it be nice if it did x, so they modify it to have x feature. Then someone decides it should be able to sync with Azure (there's always someone that wants that), so Azure sync is added, but now that interferes with x, so that has to be modified so that it can sync as well. Then we get back to original product development which is now 3 weeks behind schedule.

Repeat that enough times and you can see why a lot of this stuff fails.

jj4211 ,

Even internal projects have a facet of 'milking customers' even those customers are internal. There's a rather large internal team that has managed to last years by milking the fact their stuff always sucks but any moment when they are challenged about their projects they always have a plan to fix all that's wrong within '3 months'.

masquenox ,

During my project management days one of the things I learned the hard way is to nail down exactly what something has to deliver and getting everybody involved to sign onto it in black and white - if you don't, disaster follows.

Agile seems literally designed to make this impossible.

sugar_in_your_tea ,

Agreed. We follow agile, and we have a team of product owners who know where the project is likely headed in the next 3 years. Our sprint to sprint is usually pretty predictable, but we can and do make adjustments when new requirements come in. The product team decides how and when to adjust priorities, and they do a good job minimizing surprises.

It works pretty well imo, and it hinges on the product team knowing what they're doing.

jj4211 ,

I'd say it's that people tend to use Agile because consultants tell them they can be piss poor managers dealing with the crappiest developers and stupid business ideas and still make awesome stuff if they just make everything buzzword compatible.

I'd say projects without much of an upfront project plan can still be very successful, but it's all about having a quality team, which isn't something a two week 'training and consultancy' session isn't going to get you, so there's no big marketing behind that sort of message.

jj4211 , (edited )

I'm all for and good eye rolling at institutional Agile (basically checkered with bad management who doesn't know what to do, but abuses buzz words and asserts Agile instead), but this article has a lot of issues.

For one, it's a plug for someone's consultancy, banking on recognition that, like always, crappy teams deliver crappy results and "Agile" didn't fix it, but I promise I have a methodology to make your bad team good.

For another, it seems to gauge success based on how developers felt if they succeeded. Developers will always gripe about evolving requirements, so if they think requirements were set in stone early, they will proclaim greatness (even if the users/customers hate it and it's a commercial failure).

neclimdul ,

Feels like the old php metric. PHP had a ton of great code and successful projects but it also attracted very bad devs as well as very inexperienced devs leading to a real quality problem.

Honestly kinda see thing in a lot of JavaScript applications these days. Brilliant code but also a ton of bad code to the point I get nervous opening a new project.

My point? It may be a tough pill but it's not the project framework that makes projects fail, it's how the project is run.

intensely_human ,

Agile falls into the category of how the project is run

neclimdul ,

No it's a set of tools you can use to run a project.

My point is that a lot of people use "agile" to mean not planning or don't put guard rails on scope and they fail. That's not agile, it's just bad PM

Knock_Knock_Lemmy_In ,

Agreed.

Being Agile is being flexible. To do that you need to plan for multiple contingencies. Resulting in more planning, not none.

jj4211 ,

"agile" is being flexible. Being "Agile" more often than not means your company's incompetent management paid some hack consultants to come in and bless your flavor of stupid bureaucracy as "Agile".

ChickenLadyLovesLife ,

I witnessed a huge number of failed projects in my 25-year career. The cause was almost always the same: inexperienced developers trying to create a reusable product that could be applied to imagined future scenarios, leading to a vastly overcomplicated mess that couldn't even satisfy the needs of the original client. Made no difference what the language or framework was or what development methodology was utilized.

neclimdul ,

I've seen a lot of contractors over promising timelines too. "No matter how hard you push and no matter what the priority, you can't increase the speed of light."

But yeah exactly.

jas0n ,

Preach brother!

Ephera ,

I feel like that's the same underlying issue: The requirements are not understood upfront.

If a customer cannot give you any specific information, you cannot cut any corners. You're pretty much forced to build a general framework, so that as the requirements become clearer, you're still equipped to handle them.

I guess, the alternative is building a prototype, which you're allowed to throw away afterwards. I've never been able to do that, because our management does not understand that concept.

ChickenLadyLovesLife ,

I feel like that’s the same underlying issue: The requirements are not understood upfront.

Actually on most of these failed projects the requirements of the original customer were pretty clear. But the developers tried to go far beyond those original requirements. It is fair to say that the future requirements were not well understood.

the alternative is building a prototype, which you’re allowed to throw away afterwards

Lol I've done many prototypes. The problem is that management sees them and says "oh, so we're finished with the project already? Yay!"

jj4211 ,

Yeah, look at the most prolific language at a given time. There's your crappy projects or your soon-to-be-crappy projects. What are the universities and 'coding academies teaching'? That's going to be the crappiest stuff in the world when those students come out.

So too it goes with 'management', the popular 'self-help' style crap of the moment is what crappy teams will adopt, and no matter what methodology it is, that crap team is still crap, and it will reflect on that methodology.

cybersandwich ,

The article even states this is a thinly veiled ad for some other "method".

The agile manifesto is fantastic. Scrum can work wonders as a means for providing a framework to hang "agile principles" onto.

Most organizations don't do "scrum" well or quickly lose sight of the "why" behind it.

Companies are gonna company at the end of the day. Process + bureaucracy + buzzwords + ill-informed management + vendors promises + shit customers/product owners = late projects.

Agile done right, works. The benefit agile has over waterfall(the process it replaced in a lot of places), imo, is that it's predicated on working software, responding to change and working collaboratively/iteratively.

kaffiene ,

Imo waterfall is an imagined beast for most software devs today. I worked on many successful waterfall projects. It was nowhere as bad as the caricature that people imagine.

BurningnnTree ,

This article doesn't make any sense. A project's "success" can't really be measured in any objective way like the article is implying. Even saying that a project is "on time" is a vague statement depending on the situation, and it's not a good way to measure the quality of the end result or the efficiency of the development team.

snek ,
@snek@lemmy.world avatar

No to all cults in general, as a rule of thumb

ShittyBeatlesFCPres ,

Personally, I was never great with agile projects. I get that it’s good for most and sort of used it when I was a CTO but as a solo developer, there are days when I’d rather eat a bowl of hair than write code and then some days, I’ll work all night because I got inspired to finish a whole feature.

I realize I’m probably an exception that maybe proves the rule but I loathed daily stand-ups. Most people probably need the structure. I was more of a “Give me a goal and a deadline and leave me alone, especially at 9am.” person. (Relatedly, I was also a terrible high school student and amazing at college. Give me a book and a paper to write and you’ll have your paper. If you have daily bullshit and participation points, I’ll do enough to pass but no more.)

tinyVoltron ,
@tinyVoltron@lemmy.world avatar

Stand-ups can become so proforma. What did you do yesterday? I coded. What are you doing today? I am going to code. Do you have any blockers? No. It gets a little repetitive after a while.

ShittyBeatlesFCPres ,

I did twice a week when I was management: once at the start of a sprint, once on the first Friday where we only identified blockers, and once the following Wednesday where we talked about what can ship and be ready for QA.

The goal was to have a release fully ready on Thursday so Friday could be for emergency bug fixes but most releases are fine. If everything is perfect, great! Everyone go have a three day weekend. If QA catches a bug or two, we fix it and then ship.

If a deadline is gonna slip, just tell me when you know. It’s not usually a big deal.

snek ,
@snek@lemmy.world avatar

I found them to be useful because I usee to be in an erratic team where people either get a lot done or drag projects on for years. At least the project draggers had no place to hide when needing to report their project daily.

In my current job we only have these stand-up type meetings once weekly which made a big difference because many people had more interesting things to report and it wasn't some kind of lip service, instead people were genuinely haring progress.

Knock_Knock_Lemmy_In ,

I think you are missing the part where you help others with their blockers.

tinyVoltron ,
@tinyVoltron@lemmy.world avatar

If someone is blocked I'd be pretty cranky if they waited until the next day to mention it. Blockers are to be dealt with swiftly and with extreme prejudice.

Knock_Knock_Lemmy_In ,

Yeah. I can see in your case a stand up could be replaced with a status update message.

jj4211 ,

In my workplace, that happens in the moment of the blocker being incurred. When people are continually in communication, the daily standup is redundant and frequently for the sake of some manager/project manager who "technically" shouldn't be part of the standup.

douglasg14b ,
@douglasg14b@lemmy.world avatar

It's very likely that as a sole developer you are actually practicing agile as it's intended and not corporate "agile".

There isn't a problem with agile there's a problem with it being mislabeled and misused as a corporate & marketing tool for things that have nothing to do with agile.

chakan2 ,
@chakan2@lemmy.world avatar

Pbpbpbp...agile fails fast by design.

The counter from the article is you need a specification first, and if you reveal the system wasn't going to work during requirements gathering and architecture, then it didn't count as a failure.

However, in my experience, architects are vastly over priced resources and specifications cost you almost as much as the rest of the project due to it.

TLDR...it's a shit article that confuses fail fast with failure.

bionicjoey ,

Fail fast is the whole point and the beauty of agile. Better to meet with clients early and understand if a project is even workable rather than dedicating a bunch of resources to it up front and then finding out six months in (once the sunk cost fallacy has become too powerful)

MechanicalJester ,

Thanks for pointing that out so I didn't have to.

What's the alternative? Waterfail?

Yeah because business requirements and technology is changing at an ever slower rate...

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