Agile Ruined My Life. I read the reply to my comment on a popular hacker board with sadness: (disclaimer: Agile consultants ruined the software group I work in.)Making good software is hard, and anyone claiming to have a magical process that guarantees good software is selling snake oil.
I can appreciate your wanting to make a buck, but would also seriously appreciate it if you could find some other industry besides software development to go screw up Reminded me of an email I received back in May: [We] started working on [agile technique X] when [author]‘s [famous book] was just a draft. I was on that project and worked on Agile Projects for a decade. I’ve had many such conversations over the years.There are some seriously pissed off people about Agile out there. The easy answer — and the answer most agile-lovers would give — is that these folks are simply non-hackers. I don’t accept that. And the thing is, it’s not just the people who are being trained. So it’s time to get honest. What’s Scrum? Game Development in a Post-Agile World.
The hype and dogma of Agile evangelists has left in its wake a trail of broken projects, ruined businesses and misguided neophytes bleating the tired doctrines of their long departed prophets.
The games industry was no exception, with many swept up in the phantasmagoria from which we are only now beginning to witness the debris. Of course, there were always the more levelheaded developers, unswayed by the silky promises of besuited "consultants" - even the ones offering certificates and everything. Today these more progressive thinkers talk of "post-agile" - or common sense as it were previously known.But ripples of reason spread slowly. If I have to sit through another meeting with some little "agile" toe-rag defending their train wreck of a project then I may end up forcibly ramming a kanban where the scrum does not shine. It is not that I have anything particularly against agile, quite the contrary, but at the end of the day I have a product to ship and no patience for the quixotic.
Michael Feathers' Blog: Zeno-Length Iterations. I’ve been thinking about iterations quite a bit lately.
To me, they’ve always been an odd part of Agile. Scrum gave us the month long sprint, and for years it was sacrosanct. The thought was that it wasn’t possible for teams to do real work in less time. In Extreme Programming, we had two-week iterations, but at least it wasn’t a hard-and-fast rule. The primary consideration we had was that no matter how you picked your initial iteration-length, you should at least keep it constant and not give in to the temptation of saying “well, we’re having trouble finishing our stories for this iteration, let’s extend it for a few days.” From the very beginning, the goal of iterations was to force tradeoffs, hard decisions. The odd thing about iterations, though, is that you don’t really need them. Later, after the first wave of agile, I encountered high performing teams that had gone completely iteration-less with no ill effect.
Time boxes are a constraint. Look at your product today.