You Call This Agile? 168
JoelonSoftware's most recent piece is about some of the fallacies in "Agile" software and some of the issues within it. We use Agile in some parts of the company, and have had success with that -- that said, there's always the peril that happens when development and other parts of the company have...miscommunication, which sounds like the problem described in Joel's piece.
At the risk of being modded down... (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, it is nice to have a dogmatic approach to programming, but ultimately it really boils down to "what course of action will have the greatest benefit to the company?" It has always been this way (even outside of software development) and it always will.
Summary author on crack? (Score:3, Insightful)
Miscommunication? He's talking about context switching, which is an all too common and necessary evil in small shop development.
In any given week I can switch from architecture design to business systems analysts, back to VB6 coding for legacy app maintenance, up to
All that context switching definitely has a negative effect on my productivity. My supervisor asked me to tag tickets with time estimates when I closed them out. No biggie, but the shortest I'll tag a ticket for is 30 minutes. Originally I had said 1 hour, but my supervisor vigorously disagreed with my estimate of context switching's effect on productivity.
-Rick
Joel has capacity to speak his mind (Score:5, Insightful)
Aglie development works, but only if people can be trained. Training is something that is omitted when it is decided on whatever model you want to adhere to. Remember we are all just animals and the more training we get, the better we are at it.
Agile process is based on feedback, and therefore programmer must be trained to appreciate and nuruture feedback from his practices too. Programmers need candy too, for rewards, and that candy is a feedback from wroking code. Given, if you are writing a disk driver, feedback is limited, compared to game developer, writing graphics or sound enegines. What Agile brings, is that rewards come at a steady pace, therefore propping up motivation of developer from development side of things. Disk driver developer must find his way to recieve rewards from developing driver code, perhaps thats why compensation is higher for the driver developers, because work has no immediately accessible of stimuli and chances to get negative stimuli, like corrupt disk of the user, are quite high.
If you code not for the sake of itself, I pitiy those people. But then they aren't on the slashdot.
We go through this all the time. (Score:5, Insightful)
a. I don't have to support it.
b. It doesn't have to work.
Yes, that's funny, but it is not a joke. Processes are supposed to be about functionality and maintenance. A one-off app for a critical issue today doesn't need a process (except how to delete it tomorrow so it doesn't become part of they real system).
And that is where marketing and development differ. Marketing sees the opportunities in selling "support contracts" for code that was rushed out, filled with bugs and features that don't work.
Development only sees problems that they're going to have to fix. And fix today. And fix in the quickest possible way because the customers are complaining about a critical issue. And so forth.
So the various processes (and project managers) are supposed to translate/support both views. Get it out in time to make the sales, with a stated minimum level of functionality and no more than X bugs of various levels.
But, as you noted, it is easy to follow the process as the religion instead of recognizing that it is just a means of getting product ready for shipment so it satisfies marketing, the developers and the customers.
not Agile (Score:5, Insightful)
Also this aversion toward "context switching" isn't particularly Agile. The idea behind TDD, evolutionary design, and small time-boxed tasks is to work in small chunks. I would argue that the ability to "context switch" developers while still developing value incrementally is the whole point of the Agile approach.
Not a black and white discussion.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Really what any organization should do is instill the resources and culture for proper QA and operational support for developers. If calling the original engineer is the _last_ resort, because QA didn't catch a bug and operations can't fix the problem, thats fine. All too many organizations, however, have an engineer getting called first for a problem that probably should have been caught by QA, or that should have been caught by the operations people. Engineers hunting down problems and finding a reproducible case constantly is really what kills productivity. If the culture is "don't worry, if its broken the engineer who made it can take time out of their current projects to fix it", then your organization is broken.
Context switching, aka, incompetence (Score:3, Insightful)
Why do I see Joel constantly talking about how disturbing it is to "context switch", when sysadmins like myself are expected to handle a dozen or more tasks, most of them "surprise" stuff, daily? Don't tell me "oh, programming is complex"- so are networks.
So, you get unlimited M&Ms, a 30" screen, aereon chair, and get all upset when you spend an unexpected 2 hours out of your 8 hour workday on an emergency, one a week or so. Meanwhile, I'm working on whatever was left in the IT supply room, have to carry a pager, work 10 hour days because I'm doing 2-3 people's jobs- and I've got a half dozen long term project goals...but I'm getting bugged HOURLY to fix the most trivial shit by programmers who can't be bothered to stick paper in a printer?
If Sarah was a sysadmin and had to waste a day collecting her thoughts after spending two hours fixing a mysql database, she'd be fired. You programmers need to stop behaving like prima donnas.
Simple solution really ... (Score:4, Insightful)
Then, find the developers who are good at maintenance programming. I hate working on long projects with the associated paperwork and spending long hours working with the customer trying to tweak a table. Even Scrum requires some process work outside of development. I prefer maintenance programming that gives me a chance to know many, many systems at a high level and then dig into them when there is a problem. This lets me contact Susie for a 5 minute discussion, and then her get back to her project. There are fewer processes because the fix is often smaller, and it has to be done now. It's amazing how many processes get circumvented when customers can't use an app.
The advantage is you get staff members who may not know the deep details of individual products, but have more information about multiple products and are not tied to specific resource timelines. Plus you get developers with timelines who get fewer interruptions. I agree that context switching is bad, whether you are a sys admin or developer. Finding ways to reduce it, even if the solutions means I spend four hours fixing it instead of two, can have other benefits. For instance, being able to say 'Hmm...we had a similar problem last month on this other application, I wonder if it is a similar problem.' then asking the developer a specific question.
It's a different mindset, and it's not for everyone. People who do it have to be able to juggle multiple priorities and handle context switching well. They also need to be able to 'see the big picture' more clearly and understand how product A works with product B in detail (since many issues often fall there and result in group A blaming group B and nothing getting fixed.)
They also have to contain their ego and find the challenges in maintenance programming that are just as rewarding as new development. I love being 'the hero' by solving production problems quickly when no one else can.
Re:Context switching, aka, incompetence (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Context switching, aka, incompetence (Score:2, Insightful)
That's not to say that sysadmins don't have a lot on their plate. However, would you rather bug a programmer to load paper, or a sysadmin? I'd say neither, get the help desk tech to do it, much better use of all their time.
Re:Context switching, aka, incompetence (Score:2, Insightful)
Because you're a sysadmin, not a programmer. Unlike the latter, you are not expected to be able to focus on just one project, nor is there any need to enable you to do so.
Re:At the risk of being modded down... (Score:3, Insightful)
People still think adding people to a project will in and of itself accellerate a project. They are wrong. Yet we do it over and over again.
My question is, if supporting version 1.0 of an application is business critcal and developing version 2.0 is business critical, why haven't you trained a maintenence programmer? This is a case where careful hiring and training can pay off.
The way I have worked and like to work is to use experienced staff for new development and younger hires for maintenence work. This gives you 6 months to a year to train the new developer, adds depth to the organization and allows the senior staff to focus more on larger issues. After 6-12 months you shift the jr. developer to new design and implenetation, under direction of a senior developer. Eventually you have a new senior developer.
An added bonus is that it trains newer developers to be kind to maintenence programmers.
Re:Part of the ongoing feud with the Rails camp? (Score:2, Insightful)
Joel has a blind spot. Doesn't make him a bad person.
Description misleading (Score:3, Insightful)
In any case, the discussion between Joel and Dmitri has little or no relationship to the relative merits of Agile methods. Dmitri is just some relatively unknown consultant/guru and his individual opinion is just that. In fact, Joel didn't seem to be dissing Agile methods in general, at least not the way I read it. He is dissing Dmitri's doctrinaire approach.
Moreover, the whole discussion is far from illuminating since it is based on a totally hypothetical example. Give me a real world and specific example where we can get a concrete view of what the real priorities and politics of the situation are, and then we can form an opinion on how to behave. Dmitri in his response to Joel talks about
"trust." But if the customer involved is critical to the company, you can be sure as hell that the project manager would (justifiably) get his ass kicked if he ignored the sales request and got all touchy feely about "trust." On the other hand if this is some nundik sales person then it probably can and should be managed by the project manager.
Ultimately, Agile is all about human-centric. As such, you need to understand that organizational politics and behavior can be just as important to the success of a software project as the programming language you choose. Both Joel and Dmitri seem to be ignoring that.
Reposting my comment on Joel's forums (Score:3, Insightful)
And that sounds right to me. You don't context switch based on getting an email, and you make sure that project managers understand the implications of what they're asking for before you start working on it.
Re:Context switching, aka, incompetence (Score:2, Insightful)
Programmers get paid to create something new. "Context switching" (haven't heard it called that before, but I know exactly what is meant by it) is a real performance hit for programmers. This is because you are focussing on difficult, abstract problems, over lengthy periods of time, and you need momentum and no distraction. Interuptions to that effort set you back way more than you would think.
Sysadmins get paid to make things work, and if you're lucky, make them work better. In my experience, being a sysadmin meant occasional bursts of intense effort (usually when things were going wrong), some very boring times (when everything just worked) and some rewarding times (when you figure out how to improve the setup in some way). Interruptions and a constant stream of new problems... well, it comes with the territory. Great job, but it's not nearly as abstract as programming.
Only in the last few weeks I had to find some creative ways to get one of my developers out of the office entirely, as he was being bugged by so many other ("small") demands on his time he couldn't function on the main project anymore.
Re:Context switching, aka, incompetence (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Not a black and white discussion.... (Score:1, Insightful)
If *I* find it the cost is low.
If *YOU* as a qa person finds it the cost is a bit higher as now there are probably 5 people involved (other than me and yourself).
If a *CUSTOMER* finds it now there is not only those 5 people involved there are customers involved (usually about 2-5 people) plus support people (2-3 more people). Plus a negitive feeling from the customer.
Cost grows QUITE large after it is in the field.
I work in a place where I get called usually as a first resort as the support people 'were trained that way'. I get nothing done usually. I get 15-20 min chunks where I can do what I want. Not enough to get real work done...
Re:Summary author on crack? (Score:3, Insightful)
When doing planning-phase time estimates, our mantra is "Everything takes a day".
A whole pile of little things in the same part of the same project might get done in a day, but if you're going to bother getting enough about a particular context into your brain to do real work, you better have something to do worth a whole day.
Luckily for me, the originator of this mantra is my boss, and the CTO.
Re:The real advantage to Agile... (Score:3, Insightful)
You're bang on with that assessment. The big issue though is that this type of thinking is near-impossible to sell to anyone, anytime, anywhere.
Re:What feud? (Score:3, Insightful)
There are a lot of valid complaints about Ruby's speed (although Rails can do pretty intelligent caching); I'm not aware of anyone really attempting to push Rails' scalability to the level that Java can do. I'd disagree with the description of DHH's rants as "FUD," though, by and large. His response to Joel's critique of Rails was that, basically, "I don't think it will scale!" is in a certain sense always FUD -- unless you know of a system out there guaranteed to have no bottlenecks that will show up if its usage increases by an order of magnitude.
Why did DHH pick on Java (I use the past tense because I haven't seen much of this recently)? Because Java people were the first out of the woodwork dismissing Rails. The funny thing is, when you look at some of the biggest, busiest sites on the net -- MySpace, Yahoo, Google, for that matter Slashdot -- while you're not seeing Rails, you're not seeing Java, either. Rails has the excuse of being "immature"; Java doesn't get cut the same level of slack. I'd suggest that the reason has less to do with functionality and "scalability" as it does with simple maintainability. And that's a lot of what attracts people to Rails in the first place. It's not FUD to say that Java is a beast to work with on many levels. It's an opinion and it may not be one you share, but it's not one that's particularly unique to 37Signals developers.
There's a quote that appeared on Daring Fireball today from a golf instruction book: "As for your grip pressure, keep it light. Arnold Palmer likes to grip the club tightly, but you are not Arnold Palmer." In a lot of ways, that's what most of of the Rails "message" boils down to. Rails may not be appropriate for Google, but you are not building Google. (The corollary is that if you are building Google with Rails, even metaphorically, you'll find ways to address those issues.)
Re:Captain Obvious and his sidekick, Common Sense (Score:1, Insightful)