this post was submitted on 05 Jun 2024
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Honestly a little confused by the hatred of agile. As anything that is heavily maligned or exalted in tech, it's a tool that may or may not work for your team and project. Personally I like agile, or at least the version of it that I've been exposed to. No days or weeks of design meetings, just "hey we want this feature" and it's in an item and ready to go. I also find effort points to be one of the more fair ways to gauge dev performance.
I'm not really sure how this relates to agile. A good team listens to the concerns of its members regardless of what strategy they use.
Again, not sure how shipping with bugs is an agile issue. My understanding of "fail fast" is "try out individual features to quickly see if they work instead of including them in a large update", not "release features as fast as possible even if they're poorly tested and full of bugs." Our team got itself into a "quality crisis" while using agile, but we got back out of it with the same system. It was way more about improving QA practices than the strategy itself.
The article kinda hand waves the fact that the study was not only commissioned by Engprax, but published by the author of the book "Impact Engineering," conveniently available on Engprax's site. Not to say this necessarily invalidates the study, or that agile hasn't had its fair share of cash grabs, but it makes me doubt the objectivity of the research. Granted, Ali seems like he's no hack when it comes to engineering.
I could be wrong, but from what I’ve experienced,
is not always the norm. I’ve worked in agile environments where we had to work fast because the large corporate stakeholder had such a rapid turnaround that discussing and addressing problems meant slowing the process down, so no one wanted to be the one to say anything.
Agile feels like one of those things that works well on paper and when practiced properly, but when you get the wrong type of stakeholders involved, their lack of understanding rushes everything and makes the process and the final product bad for everyone.
I definitely agree, but that's true of any system. The particulars of the pitfalls may vary, but a good system can't overpower bad management. We mitigate the stakeholder issue by having BAs that act as the liason between devs and stakeholders, knowing just enough about the dev side to manage expectations while helping to prioritize the things stakeholders want most. Our stakes are also, mercifully, pretty aware that they don't always know what will be complex and what will be trivial, so they accept the effort we assign to items.
Remember that it is frightingly easy to lie with statistics. This is just a correlation. Smaller companies (whom may have less experience, worse less-paid engineers) may prefer agile due to the amount of up-front effort for things like waterfall.