Tuesday, June 14, 2016

agile manifesto

We have come to value...

  • individuals and interactions over processes and tools
  • working software over comprehensive documentation
  • customer collaboration over contract negotiation
  • responding to change over following a plan

The Agile thing is kinda dead huh? It backslid into a grey area of murkiness. Everyone does their own thing anymore and it's wild and loose. I guess all we have really taken away from it is that we hate Waterfall and hence, yes, customer collaboration over contract negotiation is preferred, but what that looks like is undefined. How do I wiggle out of the vise of a finite contract? I can't even tell you what was originally intended by "individuals and interactions over processes and tools" because I've never been on a project where the platform was negotiable. Either we do C# or we do Java here and we're not just gonna pick the one that's best.... that sort of thing. I can't imagine a team saying: "Let's do the new greenfield project in web forms instead of MVC because that's what's best." Maybe that's a bad example though and maybe MVC is just better, huh? Scrum sort of allows for a CYA thing when a consultancy is engaging with a client to crank out some code. The burndown chart can scream "We are not going to make it" and the client can then begrudgingly make sacrifices because they were roped into a contract that had the burndown chart's concept baked into it. Do any of the point estimates otherwise matter? What are the consequences for blowing an estimate? Is the Lean concept that we are just gonna work on what we have to work on anyways, rain or shine, king? If estimates do matter how on earth can we get them right? So many questions... that we've given up on! If your wacky process seems to be working for you, how do you know it can't be better? Maybe it's best to not break a working business model at that point, eh? Whatever. So we'll all be sick and convince ourselves that we are healthy. We have a cough, but at least we don't have cancer.

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