[lbo-talk] Theory and practice

shag carpet bomb shag at cleandraws.com
Fri Nov 22 03:51:11 PST 2013


At 06:59 PM 11/21/2013, Michael Smith wrote:
>On Thu, 21 Nov 2013 18:12:21 -0500
>shag carpet bomb <shag at cleandraws.com> wrote:
>
> > Also? The project used agile, not waterfall. The culture of DC
> > contracting companies and in the healthcare space in particular, is
> > agile.
>
>I am so glad to hear that. Agile is the stupidest, nastiest
>cult since the Hare Krishnas.
>
>I work in an 'agile' shop these days, and it's Hatlo's Inferno:
>a Taylorized nightmare where the developer gets punished for
>not being a mind-reader. I could go on and on, but I'll spare
>you.
>
>It produces crummy code, too. All written to fool the unit tests.

Yeah. Unit tests are, to my mind, stupid. In fact, I've never been in an org that actually used test driven development. There are user acceptance tests galore, but then we have real testers who do regression testing and worry about things like security, validation, and other stuff no end user is ever going to worry about.

I'm fortunate enough to have not experienced punishment with an agile approach. With the exception of the big financial outfit I worked for last year, the other three places where i've seen in operation has usually freed up developers not to have to give constraining estimates. At the financial outfit, they practiced iterfall. Here, lets just have ridiculously complex and over detailed requirements up front, written as a "user story", and then time-box development for two weeks. Product and project managers assigned the work and never asked anyone for an estimate.

The contractors in Viet Nam, working for an outfit like the one that ran healthcare.gov, just did what they always do: worked on another assignment under the table while getting about 25% of the stuff management had committed them to out the door. But because the contracting company's front men spent a lot of time drinking with the director of product development, he was too well liked for anyone to complain. And so it went.... Everyone's been fired - in management anyway - and BigA$$ Contracting company is swindling other companies out of cash.


>--
>mjs at smithbowen.net
>http://stopmebeforeivoteagain.org
>
>The reciprocal civility of authors is one
>of the most risible scenes in the farce
>of life. -- Sam J
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