Agile Development - (is basically satan)

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Chocolate Wombat

Chocolate Wombat

We're all on our way out. Act accordingly.
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kiwifarms.net
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Mar 31, 2021
I've been running into some problems at work and part of them seem to trace back to the Agile product development method. Without too many details the company I work for develops software for internal use and for reasons known only to people way above my paygrade they have a sickening fetish for iterative development.

I get there are situations where that's appropriate. The problem I see is that Agile appears to turn software into a live service rather than a finished product, enabling the developers to effectively bill their customer forever as they "iteratively develop" the application. Instead of, you know, just updating with bug fixes like a sane person.

The feature creep is getting very fucking real.

Now these same folks have sold my company on AI, which is somewhat controversial to begin with, but they have the most retarded jackasses imaginable working in the End-User Computing business area and they outsourced all of their internal tech support to a fly-by-night Indian company a couple of years ago. I see a massive fucking iceberg ahead and was looking for some feedback on how to effectively communicate this to the appropriate people at my company.

Any ideas?
 
literally tell this post to your higher ups, if they dont listen, jump ship and either find another job or make your own company.
 
it's a complete waste of time and exists for middle managers to feel important. all they do is apply arbitrary dates to get everything matched up because they think everything they don't understand should be easy to do. then when deadlines are missed they force everyone to stop what they're doing and spend days plugging arbitrary deadlines into their agile sheet that are still going to be missed anyways because you can never ever plan for everything that can happen in a project.
total manager death
 
Chocolate Wombat said:
I get there are situations where that's appropriate. The problem I see is that Agile appears to turn software into a live service rather than a finished product, enabling the developers to effectively bill their customer forever as they "iteratively develop" the application. Instead of, you know, just updating with bug fixes like a sane person.
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Agile itself is fine. Your problem seems to be there is no defined scope or people aren't sticking to the scope. The business is hiding scope creep behind "feedback". The software needs to do "x,y and z" and the customer may want changes on how x looks or y functions, but you can't say "we don't like z, do a instead" without rewriting the contract.

I'm generally suspicious of companies selling AI solutions.
 
There's a couple of different bits of advice, depending on where the real problems are for you. Agile is fine as a methodology, but managers can make any tool look stupid.

Chocolate Wombat said:
they have a sickening fetish for iterative development.
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Software is always iterative past its first release. Waterfall just does iterative development on a longer, more structured timeline than Agile. Every other methodology will iterate in the same fashion. If this is your main complaint, then your problem isn't the methodology being used (it's just measuring the iterations); the problem is what your managers consider one full iteration.

An Agile sprint is supposed to encompass one full releasable iteration. It is not a mandatory 2 weeks or whatever insane schedule your boss dictates; it's whatever works for your team or project. If you get 28 requests and package up 5 of them as a minor release, doable in 2 weeks, then you're fine. If you aren't pushing out a release at the end of the sprint, and you can't push to prod until all 28 features are done, then Agile isn't doing anything for you and can be abandoned.

Chocolate Wombat said:
The problem I see is that Agile appears to turn software into a live service rather than a finished product,
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Well, it kind of is, unless your customer declares it isn't. But really you're describing a different problem: someone is desperate to get out a minimally viable product (MVP) so they can claim an early victory. They don't want to wait for every feature to be developed and released as complete. So you rush out an MVP with most of the infrastructure, then tack on features until you run out of features.

Business training courses will tell managers this is the ONE SECRET TRICK to minimize risk and achieve higher value from your devs. They don't tell you that it's not a one-size-fits-all approach, that the budget is accounting tricks, and the longer dev cycle works better for complex projects.

Chocolate Wombat said:
enabling the developers to effectively bill their customer forever as they "iteratively develop" the application.
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Is this development being done for an internal team, or are you consultants billing an external team for each sprint? If your customer sucks at giving you requirements up front, you might be forced into Agile anyway. You can't waterfall design an entire system with only 25% of the features agreed on at the start.

Chocolate Wombat said:
The feature creep is getting very fucking real.
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You need to become a hardcore Nazi about your backlog. This is the one thing Agile/Scrum is supposed to do well: manage feature requests.

Let's say your team of developers can fit a max of 15 story points in 1 sprint.

First off, never let the customer dictate how many points a story takes, how many points you do in a sprint, or how long a sprint should be. Those variables should arise naturally from your developers by consensus, otherwise you aren't doing Agile.

Next, never let them bully you into jamming more points into a release than you agreed on. If you can do X work in Y days of a sprint, they will get X amount of work, period. They may get to choose which stories comprise X, or add dev resources to your team, but they don't get to change your team's cadence. Your customer doesn't have to be involved in the backlog grooming, but it may help if they're reasonable people; it will inform them what features come out when. And if they say a release must contain 20 points worth of stories, then inform them they can have it in 2 sprints worth of time, you aren't crunching in to make it in 1.

If you throw every feature request into a backlog and refuse to work it until the customer prioritizes it into a sprint, then they can never feature creep a release on you. Yes, they'll just keep throwing infinite work into backlog, because customers always want something more, but that's their prerogative. They can either keep paying you or accept a finished product.
 
Employees have 8 hours a day to work. Whatever is top priority, have them work on that, and move onto the next thing when it's done.

There. I just saved corporate America millions of dollars a year on bullshit paradigms and methodologies.
 
My company is the customer, the software being iterated is the software used by the company to conduct our business. But we develop software very badly because we're not a software company.

Between that and how all of our internal tech support was outsourced a couple of years ago so an Indian company could "do it better," I'm seeing this massive fucking iceberg. It's made of bad ideas, poor leadership and pajeets, and my big ass company is going to crash into it sometime in the next year or two.

I worked in tech support for this company for about 8 years, supporting the software they're iterating and business processes related to the software. The environment which led to this has existed for awhile but it's getting much worse. The Agile bullshit gets attention from me because over the past few years they have been hiring scrum managers to go to meetings and talk about work that other people actually do instead of fixing the existing issues with the software we rely on to stay in business.

I'm not in support or software development anymore, I'm in the business end of the company after the outsourcing. But all the software I use? That's the shit developed in house, and it's getting worse. It was already shaky before, and some of this stuff has been "in development" for five or more years, but they keep shoving features into it in the live environment. It doesn't work like it's supposed to and thanks to the outsourcing there's no longer viable support for people like me who have technical issues with any complexity. It's getting harder and harder to just do our fucking jobs and take care of the customers who are keeping the lights on.
 
you can ignore everything related to agile/scrum. everything about story points/velocity, sprints, sprint demos etc. is entirely nonsense. it's just an excuse to trap you in endless meetings about bullshit. at best you will have people dedicated to filling out the paperwork pretending that you're doing scrum to hide you from the rest of the organization (we call this kanban.) at worst you will have management whip a bunch of devs into producing potemkin village software and endless upon endless unimpressive demo.

my advice
  • do not engage. you may attempt to use logic, pointing out that how can scrum possibly be agile if scrum predates the agile manifesto, or how could a measure of "complexity" possible be aggregated into useful estimates (the answer, people just call it days because they understand days). this will not work - agile is literally a religion, and you will have more productive arguments with jehovah's witnesses than scrum zealots.
  • agile has many meetings (standup, retrospective, demo, scrum of scrums, scrum of scrum of scrums). nothing good has ever happened in any of those meetings
  • if people start talking about safe (scaled agile framework) change jobs
  • do not argue with the agile people. they will say that it works for them, and the reason that it's not working here is that you're doing it wrong, and the book says to do it this way. it's not worth your breath. i have twenty years of experience dealing with agile, it's always the same bullshit. just shut up and code, monkey.
  • jeets love agile and scrum for some reason. nobody knows why
  • scrum masters are not worthwhile human beings and do not matter. you will do what is nominally supposed to be their job and they will bark at you for it. it is not worth getting angry at them - you can't get that atlassian certificate without getting an orchiectomy anyway (as well as scoring 70% on a 2 day course that costs a thousand dollars)
  • being a senior dev means learning to deal with the day-to-day idiocy. you will see sprint demos where someone adds an entry field to a configuration page, someone freaks out because it doesn't follow the ui guidelines, and then fake clap afterwards.
  • agile also means doing anything involving ui sucks absolute monkey balls because there will be all sorts of assholes in these meetings. i recommend alcohol or marijuana.
 
Chocolate Wombat said:
Agile product development method
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Chocolate Wombat said:
sold my company on AI,
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Chocolate Wombat said:
Any ideas?
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Bail. There's no braintrust at the top and your objections will be ignored. Or stop caring and coast.

Agile is a cynical reduction of the software process into MBA-digestible units where programmers are food. Sometimes the Scrum Masters gag ptooie get themselves a little tummy-ache, too, but mostly you're the one who's liquidated. It sounds ridiculous but it's not a joke: you will have meetings about meetings that produce meetings. This is the complete "planning" process for Agile and touted as a benefit. There are also no other paradigms opposing Agile than Waterfall, by the way, so don't go looking for them, because we defeated Waterfall! It's bad! Agile is great and there are NO OTHER OPTIONS STOP PROPOSING ALTERNATIVES

OP, if you're young, build a company if you've got an idea. If you're old, work up a tolerance for biz BS and start kissing ass. That's the Agile way™
 
Chocolate Wombat said:
I'm not in support or software development anymore, I'm in the business end of the company after the outsourcing. But all the software I use? That's the shit developed in house, and it's getting worse. It was already shaky before, and some of this stuff has been "in development" for five or more years, but they keep shoving features into it in the live environment. It doesn't work like it's supposed to and thanks to the outsourcing there's no longer viable support for people like me who have technical issues with any complexity. It's getting harder and harder to just do our fucking jobs and take care of the customers who are keeping the lights on.
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Do you know if you have a test environment? If it's possible to offer yourself as a guinea pig for testing, you can start to establish personal rapport with the developers. If you can get on their good side, you can usually get them to focus on your specific issues. Generally speaking the developers are just trying to clear tickets and get work done. They can get really isolated from the actual business and not have a lot of understanding of how the software is really used. Being that resource for them both gives you influence and helps them deliver better software overall.

Now if they are just total assholes, just loudly complain about all of your pain points. highlight how it makes your job harder enough and you will eventually get that dev team fired. Especially throw a fit when their shitty software pisses off your customers. Developer teams are expensive, even pajeets, and pajeet developers are especially disposable to a company.
 
After reading the responses here I think I have an idea of what I need to do. I need to get into an area of the company where I have a greater degree of autonomy. There are a number of places which are not likely to be replaceable by AI for quite some time, if at all. I love what I'm doing now, but my skills are easily transferable, and there's no reason to stay in a business area that's constantly forced to pilot the latest shit excreted by our development teams.

There's no saving the company from their mistakes. Best I can do is take the money (and the pension in 25 years) and focus on helping the customers as best as I can. For a hot minute yesterday I thought about changing course to go into management but I don't have the brainworms that role requires.

Thanks for the feedback folks.
 
Agile is like Communism in that every failure is not representative of agile and that agile has never been faithfully implemented. I feel like I'm seeing this cope pop up a lot around products, methodologies and services that people have heavily invested themselves in e.g. ServiceNow is not an expensive piece of shit, it has a lot of potential and can work well, you just haven't implemented it right!

If a product, service or methodology requires a team of unicorns to make it work right, then it's simply not practical. Rather than reflecting on whether this is the case and considering an alternative course, management's typical response is to just double down. There's not a lot you can do to stop this process of self destruction once it begins, you can see if there's a way you can milk the situation, and if not, leave. It won't get better.
 
Harvey Danger said:
Agile is fine as a methodology
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Agile is counterproductive to development, and is not a development methodology at all. It is a developer surveillance methodology, whose only purpose is to be able to minutely track how developer time is being spent. I don't personally object to this, other than my baseline objection to all irrelevant wastes of work time, but the deception needs to stop. Agile wasn't created to help developers.
 
I don't believe a single Agile cultist has ever actually read Scrum (or is all the way literate in the first place)
 
cigint said:
Agile is counterproductive to development, and is not a development methodology at all. It is a developer surveillance methodology,
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That's Scrum. A good Agile team doesn't need standups or even project managers. But it's hard to find a workplace that trusts its devs enough to ship products without managerial oversight. (And recently, it's hard to find a workplace where the devs actually deserve that trust.)

I know it's kind of a lost cause to separate out Agile and Scrum, they're too intertwined in the corporate mindspace. But I will autistically insist on it, and blame enshittification of project management and the SDLC itself for them being treated as the same.
 
Chocolate Wombat said:
I worked in tech support for this company for about 8 years, supporting the software they're iterating and business processes related to the software.

I'm not in support or software development anymore, I'm in the business end of the company after the outsourcing.
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It is time for you to do what every other skilled tradesman/technician has learned to do in this situation: spin up an LLC, buy a subscription to Anthropic, and offer to do the same job you use to do for management but at triple the price as an independent contractor.

When things start to get really hairy for management, they will be pressured to 'do something' and because they are retarded management that 'something' will be 'dump the old contractor for a new contractor.' (To keep the blame externalized.) Your role is to be the guy who knows both the business and the software through and through, bilking them for a tonne of money, and using Claude Sonnet to save the day. So long as you're confident you're methodology will be an improvement over the Indians, the managers will happily spend all that company money to make themselves look better. Just don't call it Chocolate Wombat Enterprises; to save face, they need to be able to pretend you aren't a former employee who jumped ship.
 
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