[p4wnc6]

+1 million for pointing out that process/workflow can and should vary according to many factors.

Watching an organization stress in vain to assert a one-size-fits-all approach, such as letter-of-the-law Agile, is unpleasant, especially once the political games set in. Even worse to be on the team and actively shunted from being able to do your job because of all the boilerplate, parochial adherence to cargo-cult process.

[mixmastamyk]

It does mention choosing the "right tool/process for the job" about five times, but I will take the idea to first class status under the intro chapter.

[p4wnc6]

I think the point is that people should not start life by constraining their choice to some menu "Agile or Waterfall or ..." -- once you do that you're already dead.

Instead, do whatever works organically for your situation. Don't say to do whichever established, brand-name process (or, worse, some shiny new thing) -- that automatically casts the decision as if it has to be limited to a choice between a few specific (and all bad) options.

To be clear, there's a difference between saying "do whatever works organically based on the human properties of your team and your situation" vs. "do whichever one of these 2 or 3 big box things you can maybe lobby for."

It's like saying, "Here's a first course on how democracy works ... you've got Republicans and Democrats so pick one of them that suits you better." It teaches you to think that democracy (analogue to the ideal of a successful dev process) is intrinsically delimited into certain categories like Republic, Democrat, etc. (analogue to Agile, Waterfall, ...).

I think it's better that young impressionable minds are more open and not made to think in such constrained, delimited ways right from the start (even if real life will beat it into them later on).

[mixmastamyk]

Hmm, doing "whatever works" is fine when you know what the "what" is. The early chapters talk about requirements, design, quality, etc, which is what I'd believe the student needs to understand. Before the discussion happened here, the first mention of waterfall or agile was in chapter 7.

[p4wnc6]

Sometimes you need to spec requirements out carefully. Other times you need to dive in, prototype, make mistakes, and revise. Sometimes you need to research design tradeoffs for a month before beginning a single item of implementation, and absolutely none of that research can fit into anything like a "sprint" structure. Other times you need to neatly divide up a known or perpetual task into points-based subtasks for tracking, planning, and estimation.

All these things vary all the time. When I say "whatever works" what I mean is no one knows what will work for your team. No textbook will know that. It might consist of some composition of management patterns from some books, but often it will not, and you need to develop an eye for deviating from that. There is no recipe. There is no cluster of things that all the good companies had in common -- they all did (and still do) things very differently. Amazon treats people like shit and hammers on them -- and delivers good products. Google forsakes some income opportunities to selectively uphold their "don't be evil" mantra. Apple puts usability ahead of everything. Microsoft puts enterprise saleability ahead of everything.

All these different value systems, management systems, workflow monitoring processes, etc., etc., have places and times when they'll work. If you're stuck thinking in terms of rigid structures, you won't see it, and it truly can make a big difference.

In every job I've ever left from it has been because the process and experience of being managed in that role had led to burnout even after talking openly with managers about what wasn't working. I'm (perhaps foolishly) a very loyal guy. I'd love nothing more to stay at a company for a long time and get in a groove, even if I was leaving money on the table by doing so. But I can't seem to find any organization that values human-affirming management concepts over and above ritualistic adherence to bureaucratic process.

Anyway, I just see a lot of "the road to hell is paved with good intentions" in this. If you are not already familiar, you may enjoy reading Moral Mazes, because I think it's impossible to approach the task of software management without first approaching the generic task of human management and how it fits into bureaucratic machines.

[calferreira]

"In every job I've ever left from it has been because the process and experience of being managed in that role had led to burnout even after talking openly with managers about what wasn't working. I'm (perhaps foolishly) a very loyal guy. I'd love nothing more to stay at a company for a long time and get in a groove, even if I was leaving money on the table by doing so. But I can't seem to find any organization that values human-affirming management concepts over and above ritualistic adherence to bureaucratic process."

1000x this!!! I do exactly the same thing, for example i'm going to leave soon because the development process is so crippled that it just makes me want to cry. I tried to improve it and talk to management but nothing changed. I started to feel a void inside, and i realised that there was nothing i could except leave.