A revealing metaphor.

[luckylefty]

So there's some speed at which you can run for a long time. You can run faster than that for a short period, but you can't keep it up; it's not sustainable. Running faster than that is called a "sprint". Sprinting doesn't refer to a particular way of running, or a particular speed; what it means is exactly keeping a pace that is not sustainable for

Comments

[42itous]

...and I would agree with you.

[nonelvis]

Well put. I hate working on Agile projects.

[prock]

If you hate working on Agile projects that means "they're doing it wrong". I wouldn't be surprised if that's the case. There's Agile, and there's what management thinks Agile should be.

I'm working at a place that's "trying to be agile", but they have a command and control mentality which pretty much makes that impossible. In our scheme, agile is probably costing us a lot of productivity. But that's because we have stand-ups with one engineer, one team lead and five "chickens" who spent most of the time talking.

It is what you make of it. Just as you can write bad code in any language, you can be a bad manager in any management structure.

[luckylefty]

"If you hate working on Agile projects that means 'they're doing it wrong'" seems pretty clearly to me to be an example of the No True Scotsmanfallacy. Are you so certain that Agile is the One True Perfect management style that works perfectly for everyone that it's completely impossible that there are some people who hate Agile, even if it's done correctly?

I've been a professional software engineer for 25 years. I've thought pretty hard about it, and I can't remember a time when I've either learned something useful, or communicated something useful, in a "go around the room and everyone say what they're working on" meeting. Any methodology that mandates mandatory meetings of this sort is a bad one for me.

[prock]

"Are you so certain that Agile is the One True Perfect management style that works perfectly for everyone that it's completely impossible that there are some people who hate Agile, even if it's done correctly

[prock]

There are bad metaphors and bad management structures. The relationship between the two is correlational, not causal. I suppose the real danger comes from people only understanding the metaphoric language, not what that language is actually describing.

See also: "Your love is like bad medicine."

[luckylefty]

Yes, there are good and bad metaphors used by good and bad managers. But I find it interesting that one of the central metaphors in the current flavor-of-the-month software development silver bullet uses some really terrible metaphors, and no-one has pointed that out before as far as I know.

I'm not a rugby player, but from what I've seen, "when everyone puts their heads down, most lose sight of the ball completely, everyone pushes in opposite directions, and mostly they just cancel each other out and no forward progress occurs" is a reasonable description of a scrum.

And metaphors do matter. If I was interviewing somewhere, and was told "we don't call them a manager's 'direct reports'; we call them his 'slaves'", I would think twice about working there. "Sprint" rings the same sort of warning bells (though not as strongly).

[prock]

The term "sprint" is not an agile term, it's a scrum term. Scrum is one flavor of agile management, but it is not the only flavor. I'm not entirely clear about the genesis of scrum, but I think it caught on because XP was viewed as a bit goofy. Over time scrum has morphed into something closer to XP, but it still uses it's separate jargon.

Fun fact: Angry Birds is *exactly* a metaphor for scrum. The bad news; we're the pigs.

http://robsnetblog.blogspot.com/2011/12/scrum-is-like-angry-birds.html

[prock]

"... and no-one has pointed that out before as far as I know."

http://www.infoq.com/news/2008/11/sprint-misnomer