pliantalliance.org

First of all, yes, it has been over a year since I posted here. The main reason is that I had more important things to adjust to, namely, having a toddler running around the house and moving my family 1000km into the cold of southern Manitoba. Aside from that, I basically just stopped caring about the debate. It just didn’t/doesn’t matter to me anymore. The people who would get and appreciate my point of view had gotten it and everyone else was too mired in their dogma to understand what we were saying. Essentially, I moved on.

So what, you might ask, has brought me out of my pliant slumber? What could possibly make me care, now more than a year after I stopped caring and especially now that I’ve transitioned, (dare I say, “adjusted”) to part-time software developer? The answer is Luke Halliwell.

Luke Halliwell is my new hero. In one post he manages to sum up what I and others have been saying about the Agile movement all along. Namely, that it is all hype and common sense. And he does it with better, more entertaining writing then I ever did.

The whole post is, as my colleague put it, “SOLID GOLD”. But here are a few particularly golden points:

On Agile:

I’m sick of it. I can’t wait for the day when everyone realises how much of a fad-diet, religious-cult-inspired, money-making exercise it is for a group of consultants.

On methodology:

Firstly, beware following any kind of methodology. All methodologies imply a prescribed approach, a single-minded, fixed set of processes that removes flexibility and rationality. But in software, they’re fundamentally designed for mediocre developers who can’t think for themselves.

On people:

“Individuals and interactions over processes and tools” I couldn’t agree more with, but strangely, Agile is all about following processes and rarely mentions that having top people is the best thing you can ever do for a project (you could say your hiring process is more important than your development process!)

On hype:

The hype really annoys me! There are decent parts to Agile, but they’re just common sense. They don’t need a movement or a manifesto behind them, and they don’t need stupid terminology. I don’t see why I should have to call a colleague a “Scrum Master” and keep a straight face.

On daily stand-ups:

Having daily stand-up meetings is ludicrous; it exists simply to protect against the dysfunction of team members that never talk to one another. The Scrum literature goes on about how great it is that people can’t be blocked by anything for more than a day because of these meetings. In anything resembling a normal, common-sense team, people will surely raise blockages with their manager as soon as they occur and not need to wait for a daily meeting!

On scrum:

There is literally nothing here of any interest to me. It’s a bunch of common sense (sometimes bordering on banal) stuff, with some very arbitrary decisions made for you on things like meeting frequencies, and some really stupid terminology. I don’t see how it benefits anyone but the worst of teams, and they have bigger problems.

Gold, gold, gold, gold, gold and gold. Luke has hit the nail on the head and hopefully the games industry will be better for it. At least, I’m sure, his company will be better for it.

I’m not sure if Luke’s post will get me off my duff and make me post more here. I may as well just redirect pliantalliance.org to Luke’s article and be done with it.