[Kim_Bruning]

Oh, my impression is that there's many iterative approaches to writing code (and doing other things besides). All of them work for a while, and then either someone "simplifies" out the iteration part, or in some way they render the iterative part toothless.

Basically you end up with something resembling a cargo cult, with all the rituals still there, but the tightly coupled feedback loop is missing.

Quick question: There's some sort of minor UAT ~once a week (or per whatever your cycle is), RIGHT? And then you find out umpteen things wrong (with the software and with the specs) , and you fix them; RIGHT?

If you have an actual commissioning or final UAT at the end of your project, it's just a formality with cake RIGHT?

Else how is that even agile? :-P

[smackeyacky]

I yeah, I’m holding it wrong that’s the problem. Agile suffers from the “no true Scotsman” fallacy to a massive extent. If the methodology was any good nobody would be arguing whether they were doing it wrong or not.

My contention is not “holding it wrong”, my contention is that it’s irredeemably flawed because the nature of it puts 99% of the actual (not fabricated) work and responsibility solely on developers, making the project manages and BA useless noise you have to fight just to get anything finished.

[Kim_Bruning]

Heh, you are probably not wrong? It's not that you're holding it wrong. It's just you're more likely to have gotten a cargo cult version of it by now, so there's no way to hold it right in the first place. Agile isn't the first and isn't the last iteration of this particular pattern.

Extreme Programming, RUP, Spiral Model, RAD, DSDM, probably some variants of CMMI, ISO 9001 , we can continue this list for a while or even get into other disciplines. Each time you start out with a real feedback loop doing real work, and in the end everyone has cargo culted it. Mostly because a lot of people don't grok what feedback loops are, and think they can leave 'em out. I'm not even sure the project managers and BAs are the only ones to blame here. The whole organization conspires to replace scary feedback (and it really is scary!) with comfortable processes. Users don't want to talk to devs. Devs don't want to ship half-baked things. Managers need predictability for their spreadsheets. Everyone gets the cargo cult they deserve. "We mostly just took the good parts" := We left out the active ingredient.

After a while someone comes along with this radical new invention: "let's ACTUALLY apply a feedback loop", and here we go again.

To be fair, it DOES work for a while. you can start out dressing in drag and doing the hula[1] for all I care, so long as you iterate and run a feedback loop! At some point you'll actually successfully build a million dollar product anyway. .... Of course people will then copy you and dress in leaf skirts and dance all night long, and THEIR projects all fail.

This has been "Kim's overly oversimplified history of innovation in development methodologies". You're welcome, I'm sure.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Etkws_5mexg

[svilen_dobrev]

> conspires to replace scary feedback

> lot of people don't grok what feedback loops are

or they grok it very well, esp. the scary part..

Very few people want/enjoy negative feedback. On ANY level, bottom to top, the higher, the less probable to like/take it, esp. from underlings. Because that needs understanding of common goal at very different level, and incentives aren't aligned that way. Maybe in tiny companies / teams-left-on-their-own , corrective feedback works. for a while. But scaling it?

> We left out the active ingredient.

yea, thrown out the baby with the dirty water. In most cases last decade, i am only seeing rituals without essence, "monkey-policy" style. But i have not seen much dedication either, people want to get-on-with-their lifes, and doing work is just a vehicle

[Kim_Bruning]

Sure personal feedback is scary, but to be frank it's only a small part of it, and doesn't need to get personal at all. And the machines participating in systems don't have feelings. (mostly at least ;-) )

Just to be sure, I'm talking closed loop control, right?

Observe current state, compare to desired state, figure the difference, act to reduce the difference, repeat until current state is close enough to desired state within tolerance. How else do you close the gap reliably?

Very important concept in tech (lots of control theory), biology (neural closed loop control), business (pdca), and military (ooda, guided weapons) . Some places it does work, FAA has Just Culture with blameless post-mortems; that works. Boyd had to fight for it, but military do have OODA in a lot of their theory now. Demming's PDCA is of course famous because of the japanese companies applying it (and then people started copying the idea and it didn't always work :-P) . But... people do keep missing the secret of tightly monitored closed loops and instead use ritualized open loops.

Agile started out the same way: plan on a short horizon, check how well you're adhering to it, improve both the planning process and the process under control, wash rinse repeat until you're on target.