What happened to the agile movement? Uncle Bob

#agile #agileframework #agilemanifiesto #unclebob #kentbeck #softwareengineering #softwaredevelopement #cleancode

In this video, Robert C. Martin (Uncle Bob) the author of the books Clean code and Clean Architecture, speaks on the reason why the agile movement has lost its appeal among developers over the years and what he thinks is the way forward. Thoughts?

[calebghormley]

Our office claims to be Agile, but we have fixed features, quality, order of delivery, and deadlines (determined by management). As devs we call it Waterfragile.

[bhelmore]

After being a successful software developer/architect for 40 years, the adoption of "Agile" by my company completely destroyed my love for what i did. Delusional upper management saw it as a utopia. They used it as a cudgel to bludgeon engineers into being more "productive", believing that software engineering was analogous to manufacturing. The number of middle managers exploded. Tons of cheap (and untalented) offshore engineers were added.

The worst developers "gamed" the process and projects became a nightmare of never ending meetings and fire fighting. All of our code (since the use of Agile mostly discourages the idea of code ownership) began to reflect the worst developers on our team rather than the best. I retired and have never looked back.

[braincraven]

I hate Agile with a passion not because of the process but they way it's abused by leadership thinking it's a way of pushing development bypassing design. 😞

[jammintoast]

In my 35 years experience I’ve seen many SDLC methodologies, and not once did the method make or break the product. Success comes from skilled analysts that ensure product delivers value. Meanwhile everyone is arguing about whether something should be classified as a feature or a story, even though they don’t understand the business requirements that will add value.

[LiamODev]

Project managers love to 'project manage' complex discovery tasks - which just doesn't make sense. Agile is becoming just another layer of 'reporting', rather than a methodology of 'delivery' :(

[mcndr]

Agile has lost all meaning. Every company labels themselves Agile, without adopting any bottom up improvements in process or allowing space for creativity or fostering healthier relations between people. This unfortunate state of affairs is the natural consequence of hype having replaced long term prosperity. Everyone builds pointless vaporware on a death march, so there's nowhere to go to vote with your feet toward sane practices.

[TheEtherea]

I was a PM following the general idea of Agile. I gave people autonomy, monitored progress and had further discussions when necessary. Never had to micromanage people until an actual ASAP situation had happened. Major b2b systems were implemented successfully. As I left, Scrum came in my place and employees wanted to hang themselves with dailies, one to ones and more meetings they had idea what to do with. 6 months later there was nobody left. Literally everyone left.
People can't comprehend this level of micromanaging bs when you give them autonomy and freedom to complete tasks for years prior to that.

[steveoc]

I don’t care what label you use to describe “the next great improvement” to replace Agile

If it involves having stupid meetings all the time … then it’s just another gigantic waste of time

The average developer doesn’t need another meeting every couple of hours to know what to do next. They are not like children lost in a shopping mall

For most developers, their biggest problem is not knowing when they are ever going to find the time to work on the things that they already know have to be done by the end of the week

Just let them do their job

[rtwas]

With my first and last experience in Agile, I found it to be a mechanism that enables upper management to more closely micromanage developers. It was rather unpleasant experience in my case.

[StephanLuik]

When an adverb becomes a Noun (with capital N) you know that your concept has been hijacked by business bobos. I have seen it all: VSP, RAD, XP, RUP, LEAN, Agile, Six Sigma, SCRUM, SAFe. As soon as the trademark sign appears behind the name, you know you're in trouble.

Just build stuff that works and have some fun in the meantime.

[sholinwright]

In my shop, we introduced SAFe, which has turned out to be the bloated, overweight, top heavy version of agile. It’s also allowed for many non specialists to migrate into engineering management. If you don’t know anything about radar, you probably don’t make a very good radar engineering manager.

[smitrotti]

We are in the industry that for decades has frequently brought "the silver bullet" that didn't quite meet the expectations the hype engendered.

[arturhellmann]

We were a good working, self managed Software Team. We took some advantages from scrum, had a board and such things... but we did it our own thing. we did not need a lot of meetings, dailies were optional. Everything worked perfectly. Then someone from upper levels (basically a company that bought us) meant to implement scrum... We got a scrum master and what not... calendars got full with dailies, plannings, retrospectives... And everything went down... Now that I am leading, I would never do scrum again. We are working agile, but with a bunch of common sense... I feel like Scrum is just a way of overcomplicating a process that should run smoothly on its own with common sense and a good team...

[grizfan]

Agile has been ruined beyond all recognition. It started out as a good approach, but as soon as the con artists and grifters moved in, the entire word has lost all meaning. I spent nearly 30 years working in the corporate world for a large tech company, and the last 10 years of that was largely ruined by Agile and the people pushing it. It took me far too long to recognize the fact that every single person pushing for some sort of agile approach was a no-talent hack who wasn't able to contribute any real value to our work, and instead was using agile as a way to collect a paycheck. All a bunch of parasites. I knew one scrum master who had actual skill and integrity, and she jumped to a different role the first chance she got.

[kpbendeguz]

Management's role is to set long term goals and make practical decisions on the way of achieving it. In the name of agile this turned into starting the project without any plans, collecting extreme amount of data on a daily basis to understand what's currently going on, making short term decisions in order to survive the next day, basically crysis managing the whole project from start to end.

[kennethmark]

Good to listen to one of the initiators of the Agile movement, their original idea and principles.

[ktreier]

As a CTO, my sole experience with a Certified Scrum Master was a negative one. They were so bound by the constraints of the “process” they were willing to allow the Company’s reputation be harmed by an outage.

[hallstewart]

30 years ago, I had a standup row at a job interview: software is engineering, but coding is a craft. The interview went mental at the idea that programmers were craftsman.

[strayparticles]

I once worked for a company that was proudly “agile” and “first time right” (which meant no refactoring)…

[jf]

I remember what happened after our scrum master left the project. Nothing...