It was going so well until it turned into “old white men created Agile and they don’t understand POC’s and women”.
The ‘weirdos’ in the first paragraphs were primarily nerdy men. The landscape has changed tremendously since then - Agile is terrible for many things, but it does not incite racism or bias. Perhaps the only bad thing it does not do.
This is completely out of context. He said that before civil rights were realized, and Black Americans were regularly structurally discriminated against. The special thing that needed to be done was to not let things remain the status quo but to allow Black people to become full members of society.
I love it when people who have no idea about our profession start doing this race baiting bullshit. I’m really hoping (too optimistic, I know) that HN will collectively one day start flagging articles written by clueless people who spend an awful lot of words to say less than nothing.
No, you don't understand (/s), now he is in the 'in group' and gets brownie points, and because he used that logic, you can't criticise him or you are a racist/something other.
Agile as per the Agile Manifesto isn't bad. At all.
I saw the transition of the industry from a complete waterfall process to the overhyping of agile, the pushback and now the land where agile as per the manifesto is more-or-less a given. The old ways were so much worse...
The bad sprouts from agile are the multitude of processes and bullshit methodologies that tried to ride the hype and create "The Agile Way". Scrum and others are a side-effect of this and I'm very glad to see Scrum being shunned for the past 4-6 years and instead engineers being attracted towards much more lightweight processes.
The problem with agile is that it only works when people had experiences, bad and good, and a team can tailor how their agile process should look like given their constraints. Throwing a bunch of juniors under an agile methodology and telling them what's right or not only creates friction and useless rituals, you need experienced people (PMs, EMs and at least one engineer) to cut the bullshit and stick to the points that matter: collaboration, communication, re-assessment of priorities, etc.
It's vague as hell though. Everybody from the agile consultants to the CEO down to the lowliest engineer projected their desires and intrinsic meaning on to the agile manifesto.
If you ask 10 people what agile "really" means you'll get 10 different answers, many quite incompatible with each other.
Agile focuses on the continuous improvement of not just the software, but the process. They tried to be specifically not too verbose, as dedication to one size and shape of process that does not fit all is precisely what they were against. Agile can be thought of as a meta-process. It's an attitude and a process for improving your process. Think kaizen for your software development team. It's about the tight feedback loop about what's working, what's not working, and what can be improved.
Beyond that, 10 people might find that the processes they've refined from Agile really do differ. That might be because of differing (and broken) application of Agile itself, which is a common claim. It might be, though, that continuous improvement of process has lead different teams in different directions that function well or well enough for those teams.
Fully agree with you, Agile as first proposed was like opening a window in a house in the desert in July; such a breath of fresh air. In the early 2000s you were ahead of the curve if you could manage a point release every six months. Saying "continuous development" would have gotten you laughed out of the building.
>Agile as per the Agile Manifesto isn't bad. At all.
If you actually read it it really is just a bunch of words that doesn't specify much of anything at all. To me it reads as something incredibly vague and hand-wavy and how on earth modern Agile has been inferred out of the text of the agile manifesto is somewhat beyond me.
It's a product of its time, it has seeded practices that for us is common knowledge nowadays. In 2005 it wasn't, most software companies were still stuck with long feedback loops, hierarchical decision making and goal-setting, over-analysis of requirements and little to no maneuvering room to change requirements once development was started.
It's vague exactly because it's a manifesto, not a handbook on how to apply it.
95% of articles on Agile are incorrect and this is no different.
1. Mike (Miguel) Beedle was latino.
2. "Al Tenhundfeld, one of the manifesto’s authors" - NOPE.
I could go on but what's the point.
If you want to learn about agile I recommend reading Alistair Cockburn, James Coplien and Craig Larman. They're old school and know the history of this stuff amazingly well.
We are in an era of mythologizing that old white men are at the root of all problems, so thinkpieces like this have to mention old white men as a matter of course.
That said, however, the article is correct to assert that Agile, as implemented in real organizations, addresses the corporation's needs and only those needs. Otherwise, it wouldn't have been adopted at all, but dismissed as the snivelings of whiny insubordinate programmers who forgot just who signs the checks.
>We are in an era of mythologizing that old white men are at the root of all problems, so thinkpieces like this have to mention old white men as a matter of course.
That we've gotten to this point must also be old white men's fault.
When you boil it down, it probably is. I don't believe for a moment that the reason why Occupy was scuppered by social justice stuff has nothing to do with the fact that the sort of person who attends the WEF was very threatened by Occupy.
Indeed. But I remember the race/gender thing was inexistent, nobody cared if a programming language is race biased or gender biased. Those are first-world woke problems. Solving those problems will not solve the entire topic. People focus more on external issues with 0 correlation instead of the main topic. It's logic that we need to apply to solve problems, not feelings.
Having spent the better part of a decade working with agile teams in Asia I too find such statements to be decidedly off. My Scrum masters have all been POC and mostly female.
Agile's crisis (which is real) is because despite the generativity of the manifesto, the frameworks it spawned largely ignore how change happens in a healthy and sustainable way. It is deeply ironic how much the Agile industry leans into 1990's models of change (solution-driven, imposed, etc).
That explains an awful lot. When people think that it's enough that they're right, bad things happen. Agile doesn't actually need a theory of society to understand that, just a little humility.
The Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) includes review and change cycles driven by teams at the grass roots level. Of course some organizations skip that part, but you can't blame agile frameworks for management choices.
Every framework has some kind of inspect-and-adapt thing going, nothing special about SAFe in that regard. The bigger question is how the organisation is supposed to get from zero (not using the framework) to the point where it is working at every scale, necessary if claims of business agility etc are to be realised. If the answer is a rollout project, then the dissonance there (not to mention the pain) should not be underestimated.
Organizations starting from zero typically hire experienced trainers and consultants to guide them through the initial implementation and then a few cycles. That's expensive, but cheaper than failing. Of course if senior leadership isn't truly committed then it still won't work, but that's not the fault of the framework.
It's also only a couple of paragraphs in a long post and offers some evidence of parts of the agile methodology (retrospectives and code reviews) being used to harass people so it seems unfair to knock the article for those reasons in my opinion
That's a problem with top-down management in general. If your management is largely old white men who pull the strings, yes obviously it's going to account for their opinions the most.
Author misses the part where the majority of the working force is also "white men" who see no benefit from this either, because it turns out, the decisions of management aren't for "white men" or even "old white men". The decisions are for "our management".
Agreed. I am a white man but I don’t feel much connection to upper management. It doesn’t really matter if the leaders are white, not white, male or not. They are out for themselves and don’t really care about their underlings.
Talking about agile, I subscribe the ideas from Allen Holub (holub.com), especially because he doesn’t talk about a one-size fit all formula, instead he focuses in collaboration between peers, and short feedback cycles aiming to solve business challenges.
I felt like the justification for saying that agile was not good for underrepresented groups came very late, but it is there and it actually is not a bad argument.
> We’ve long known that eliminating bureaucracy, hierarchy, and documentation feels great, until you’re the person who needs rules for protection.
I think the article eventually makes good arguments for this, at least if you are willing to say that code review and pair programming are things that spring out of the spirit of the manifesto.
Basically they author is claiming that the goal of the agile manifesto is to remove oversight from developers so that they can focus on "the project". The downside is that you are losing oversight of bad behaviour, which gives space for work-place bullying. (and the other downside argued is that developers, who are also stakeholders, do not have a voice in questioning the utility of the project overall).
I never read it as "removing oversight", more like "removing excessive admin". And it explicitly says to value "individuals and interactions". Part of that means you need a facilitator in retrospectives who can detect conflicts between individuals which may not be being addressed in that forum - and ensure that they are addressed elsewhere.
The ‘weirdos’ in the first paragraphs were primarily nerdy men. The landscape has changed tremendously since then - Agile is terrible for many things, but it does not incite racism or bias. Perhaps the only bad thing it does not do.
I was hoping for a better ending to this read.