Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by OHfsfuiohsef 54 days ago
Continuous integration and demos to stakeholders (devs, designers, product managers etc) every 2 weeks - these practices are now engrained :-) It's frequent to then do corrections after these demos, and that really helps ensuring the product manager is getting what their customers need.

Easy to forget waterfall in 1970s / 80s really meant teams working on their own for months and then realizing there is no way to assemble the whole product from the parts. Or that the industry has moved on and the product is obsolete.

Agile as "devs can do what they want" never really existed ;-) Managers always have to plan / T-Shirt size resources (time, devs) to some degree. For stuff that's really hard to break into tasks, the magic word is "the plan is to do a POC first".

Coming from someone who also doesn't like teams being asked to break their unknowns into 30 known tasks. It's a compromise... I agree with all your points on how Agile is abused / misunderstood. Yet i believe in the progress from continuous integration and regular demos to stakeholders as a sign we did change something....

1 comments

Most companies don't do that much of a regular demo to customers anyways - turns out most customers aren't even interested for the first 30-50% of the project, then they become mildly amused, until the final 80% - that's they start getting incredibly interested and opinionated.

> Agile as "devs can do what they want" never really existed ;-)

No real agile ever really exists in the end :)

But it's not devs not doing "what they want" that bothers me - it's the absurdly over-planned project estimates and timelines, with every detail of the project being specced out, not a lot of margin room for errors, invoking the name of "agile principles" as a way to deal with exactly things the PM's don't want to deal with in that moment.

I'd be fine with some degree of planning ahead, or starting with prototypes/PoC's, but such a huge part of the industry just chunks it into "same boat but we'll put agile stickers on the holes", and there is a whole industry of ceremonies around it, that it breaks the "core principles" of agile.

What a beautiful irony have we built :)