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by kodemager 1627 days ago
> Agile’s been around for over 10years and people still don’t do good versions well)

Agile software development has been around since the early 90’ies. Scrum is from something like 1995.

The reason people fail to implement it so often is that project management sort or doesn’t work in software development, and it doesn’t work because you can spend two hours looking for a spelling error or a missing semicolon, and you can create Godlike code in half an hour, and you never know which mode you’re going to be in when you get up in the morning.

Waterfall doesn’t work either, for the same reason, and for all the adaptive reasons that lead to agile.

The best way to deal with it is to take the methods that make sense for your current project and run with that. 99% or the time that’s a kanban board, and maybe some time registration software if you’re unfortunate enough to work in a place that bills by the hour.

The worst part about the project management methods in my personal opinion is that they all want to sell themselves as the universal solution, in a world where no two projects are alike but you also can’t be bothered to have 90 different project models in an organisation, because then what’s the point.

2 comments

In my experience agile mostly fails because of unrealistic management expectations: Deliver a given set of features in time and quality. Especially C-Suite and one level below has this expectation with no idea what agile really means. From there, it trickles down...
> and it doesn’t work because you can spend two hours looking for a spelling error or a missing semicolon, and you can create Godlike code in half an hour, and you never know which mode you’re going to be in when you get up in the morning.

That's ADHD (maybe modulo some external factors like scattered meetings)

> That's ADHD (maybe modulo some external factors like scattered meetings)

That doesn't seem like ADHD to me. Getting to a super-productive flow state is notoriously difficult to do reliably for everyone, and getting stuck on a stupid typo you can't find even though you know it is somewhere in the 50 lines of code you're looking at is likewise a fairly common experience.

Folks with ADHD may actually be better at achieving a hyperfocused state of flow, but the flip side of that isn't hunting for a typo, it is falling down a rabbit hole of yak-shaving, procrastination (productive or otherwise), and other distractions.

Somewhere in between is the experience of trying to hold more and more context in your head at once, resulting in a feeling like your brain has been pummeled and leaking out your ears, staring at some code that has become entirely illegible. This can be the result of ADHD-driven yak-shaving, but more commonly is the result of needing to comprehend huge chunks of a badly architected system before you can make a change with any confidence.

Coming back to this comment after a few days, I find that what I was trying to say with the last bit is that yak-shaving can be either intrinsic (ADHD) or extrinsic (badly architected, deeply intertwingled code with leaky abstractions).