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by keyraycheck 1182 days ago
I would love to know how people work. I wonder what is the alternative.

The board is far from only agile practice and nit obligatory either. Even Epic sounds like an agile term.

3 comments

The problem I have with your question is "agile" seems to mean anything except a pure waterfall development model.

Even modified waterfall seems to be described as agile.

As a sole developer of a software product, I haven't figured out how the agile principles even apply to me.

"Individuals and interactions over processes and tools" doesn't work when there's only one person.

"Working software over comprehensive documentation" Does that mean ship code but don't provide comprehensive documentation to my users? No, it means internal process documentation. Which isn't applicable since it's just me.

"Customer collaboration over contract negotiation". That only applies for contract software development. I sell a software product.

"Responding to change over following a plan". I don't have much of a plan, so I guess I do this one. But I do have a long-term vision, since that's essential to figuring out what groundwork to have.

Personally, I learned RAD (rapid application development) when I was a young programmer back in the 1990s, and that's what I still use.

You, the developer, have one customer: you, the software vendor.

The software vendor sells a software product, not the developer.

Next, tell me how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.

Assuming your definition makes sense, what are the "interactions ... processes and tools" between me-the-vendor and me-the-developer?

What is the comprehensive documentation that I'm supposed to avoid?

What is the contract negotiation?

Think about it.
I've spent over 20 years thinking about it, and not been able to figure it out.

Since it's clear to you, perhaps you can clarify how the Agile Manifesto applies to software product sales when there's a single developer and once-per-year product cycles?

Well, you do have a process there already — the release cycle. Why once per year?
I was using the term to find common ground. I don’t call them epics, just they are a big thing.

Scrum reminds me of the old adage about measuring a beach, you can measure it by sight, or by using a yardstick, or by counting grains of sand in a row. Scrum sits too close to counting sand, I prefer to be at the yardstick level.

There is an idiocy to scrum that involves/wastes the whole team on simple planning tasks that could be more effectively done by a single person. This is compounded with practices like mobbing… It removes craft from software and just makes it lowest common denominator.

Agile manifesto is still great and relevant. But that’s not what people mean when they say Agile

My team of 7 (inc manager and pm) does 2 stand-ups a week (doing it in slack is okay if needed), and never sprint planning or any other recurring meetings. Any other planning or meetings is done as hoc as needed. We usually have ~3 projects going on in parallel so not many cooks in kitchen and not a lot of syncing required. We use jira for tickets and have a “sprint board”, but it’s super casual just a place to track stuff and I roll the sprint once a month without any meeting or ceremony.