On 07/12/2012 09:52 PM, David Kramer wrote:
On 07/12/2012 12:53 PM, Mark Woodward wrote:
I think "agile" development is probably the most abusive management
technique ever devised. Sure, aspects of it are good software
development processes, but the implementation is pretty exploitive, in
my opinion. Every "agile" environment I have seen works the engineers to
death. The "scrum" meetings are another form of micromanagement with the
added benefit of peer coercion.
A few years back, a lot of people were excited, but today, I have yet to
meet anyone that doesn't think "agile" is a meat grinder. It burns out
good people and produces poor product quality.
Mark, we've had had this conversation before, and you have met me, so I
can safely say you're lying.
David, yea, we have met and that was some time ago. Yes we have had this
conversation. Next time I express my opinion on this subject, I will say
"except for one."
I've been working in Agile environments for
years and I've never felt more empowered to say "no, we can't do that by
then".
Then your experience is different than that of many of my colleagues.
I'm pretty sure the hundred-or-so people who show up to Agile
New England and Agile Boston meetings every month would agree. I'm
sorry you had such a bad experience with what some idiots called Agile,
but if you were feeling like a slave, then it probably was not Agile.
Saying that you're "doing Agile" when you're not is almost as common as
really "being Agile"
As I have said many times, "Agile" is interesting in that it codifies
many practices of old-time quick developers. The problem is that too
often it is used as a tool increase work load. Unless you are careful,
you overlook proper design because of increased time pressures. You get
in the "sprint" death spiral where you don't have time to design, but
you have time to iterate. You end up in a constant state of late with
the "slot machine" mentality of hope you'll make it up in the next sprint.
Normally I would say "Let's just agree to disagree", but I feel I have a
bit more of experience in this particular area than you, and I wish you
would stop trashing Agile when you've not actually done it.
That depends on how you define "experience." You may have had positive
experience with "Agile," I have not. I have colleagues with whom I
discussed the problems and had a lot of agreement. While I will respect
your opinion, it is fundamentally different with my experience. You have
your experience and no one is calling you a liar. I have mine, and I
hope you have the good manners to do the same.
On 07/12/2012 12:16 PM, Doug wrote:
Does an agile development process make sense for projects that are all
volunteer based, with people who don't live in the same states or
countries? In my job, we use greenhopper, part of www.atlassian.com
set of software. There are morning scrum meetings, story sessions,
sprint planning and sprint completions. That makes sense when
everyone drives to the same building. For a volunteer based project,
those regular meetings are not going to be held.
- Geographically disparate team members is definitely a hindrance, but
not a show stopper, if you can counter with the right technologies, and
the time zone differences aren't too great. Jira+Greenhopper is a great
start. You'll need a wiki for persistent knowledge management, but I
assume if you have Greenhopper you already have Confluence, too.
- All-volunteer workforce is not really a problem at all. In fact it
tends to be a bit less of a problem than some other practices, because
Agile teams often become meritocracies where good work is rewarded more
than seniority. This is especially true if and when the team reaches
the stage of being self-organizing (people volunteer to work on stories
instead of being assigned them, and they do what's needed the most but
also what they enjoy)
Agile New England (which I'm on the Board of) has an event every year
called Agile Games, which is a 3-day conference. All volunteers working
in their spare time. But we have a backlog, we have weekly standups
over the phone instead of daily standups, We have retrospectives to make
sure we're doing things the best we can.
There are concessions you have to make in that environment, though.
We're not strictly following one flavor of Agile, but we are using a
complimentary and comprehensive set of practices that are Agile to the
best of our abilities; We communicate very frequently and freely, we
focus more on solving problems than placing blame (shared ownership of
the product), and we record the status of tasks so everyone knows where
everyone else stands. We don't have sprints, but we do have milestones
that we associate with tasks and stories.
The biggest challenge is going to be frequent *but focused*
communication. Lots of people need to interact in a way that
effectively conveys the information to the right people in a timely
manner without swamping people who don't need that information, ruining
the S/N ratio.
The way we do that in Agile New England (and in Agile Games) is to have
*lots* of mailing lists. There's one list for all volunteers, and one
list for just the Board, then there's separate lists for each team:
marketing, sponsors, speakers, IS, hotel, finance.... Separate channels
means rapid communication with retained sanity.
I can imagine a planning board being of use. "Look, here,
specifically is what we want done next." That could be overkill
however, with say a newsgroup, twiki and github being sufficient.
Part of Agile practices is the balance of power, like the government
used to have. And you can't have balance of power without interactive
planning. So having the work all documented on the wiki is great, but
the planning itself needs to involve all involved parties. A wiki can
sort of do that (as you do planning during a teleconference call,
someone updates the wiki and everyone else can refresh at will. I've
come up with a specific table layouts in Foswiki that works well for us,
using some of its very advanced form/table tools, and that works well
for us.
Sadly, tools that do this very well are pretty expensive. You can do it
in Greenhopper better than in a Wiki, but we don't have that option in ANE.
If you do think some aspects of the agile process make sense, what
software would you use? I could pony up $20/month and use atlassian's
hosted service. I don't think I will have 10 people who want to code
in a year, but one never knows. If it does take off, then the costs
jump.
I personally would not use a service hosted on someone else's machine
simply because I am a privacy nut and I've seen too many companies
discontinue free services with no way to export your existing work.
Everything we do is hosted on a virtual web host (HostGator, who I
adore). We don't have the ability to install Java, and that prevents us
from using certain tools. Most everything we do use is Perl or PHP based.
There are free Agile planning tools out there. We've found them
insufficient for our fairly complex needs, but you might find them
sufficient. One of them is https://seenowdo.com/
The project of course involves quaternions, thinking about making
animation software using the multimedia Java platform known as
processing (http://processing.org/) for web sites and android phones.
Sounds cool!!
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