Our team has started the whole Agile thing. It's insane, standup meetings that take 45min to an hour, multiple meetings in a day, hot airbags that like to hear their own voice talking, and talking and talking. It's so much heavier than any other process I've ever been involved with. I think the managers like it because it give them more meetings to attend and feel useful. One good thing at least is that I attend so many meetings, when they ask for my status I can say "in between meetings, I did a little bit of coding...". Luckily we're not doing the whole 'pair programming' paradigm where 2 people sit at same keyboard jacking each other off while surfing the web. I seriously can't believe how much time is wasted with this crap, didn't know if it's isolated to my team?
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I've done several methods, agile is pretty bad, waterfall is worse, the govt sector has a massively slow process... I've found the best process is the one where people meet when needed, with someone loosely tracking the project (not possible here at Q - usually in smaller companies). Any 'recurring' meeting is bad in my book (I'm sure all the agile'ites will disagree).
Go get a lawyer and sue the crap out of the people that taught you how to do scrum.
You are not doing Agile in the right way! Daily stand up cannot exceed 15min. And you should be involved in the scrum meeting no more than 3 times each sprint(for one month sprint, the whole meeting time is around 10 hour). You can find more details here:
http://www.scrumguides.org/
Pair programming can be very powerful but won't work for everyone. It's not only for newbies.
This pretty much sums it up
Large testing farms are far more effective.
I can count on 1 hand the number times code reviews have caught a real problem. Large testing farms are far more effective.
Code reviews are just an opportunity for a--holes to complain about variable names and minor code structure issues which are just largely personal choice.
ced: If management doesn't know what the coders are doing, that's management's fault. There should be a process in place. This should involve clear and understandable planning of what is expected from the outset that involves all levels--from engineers to lower-level executives, and all departments involved along with weekly status reports by the worker bees. Engineers should not have to interact with a manager, aside from weekly meetings, and reviews, unless they encounter a specific problem. Anyone who has to email a manager every 10 minutes for an "attaboy" should be dumped from the project. By the time you have an advanced degree, you shouldn't need to have your hand held by your superiors.
Been doing agile for 5 years now
If done properly, it works
45 min is too long
If the mgr likes to talk, have someone shut the f--- up
And don't complain about Agile and Scrum. It's far better than using a heavyweight process like TSP/PSP and/or Fagan Inspection. You would know what those were if you either work in the defense sector or medical device industry at some point in your career. I mean, literally you're inspecting every line of code, reviewing every line of code, documenting every defect that occurs on a per line, estimating KLOC's before you can even code. If you ever gone through that process, you'd probably want to blow out your brain afterwards... I almost did.
If stand up meetings are taking 45 minutes, then you guys are doing agile completely wrong. Sounds to me the bean counters have found a new way to bean count, because they read about it.
That said, the thought of some geek working in some corner of the room coding away himself without any sort of peer review or awareness of what he is doing is terrifying on its own. Geeks tend to think their code is better than everyone else's. and tend to get pretty crazy with it if left alone.
Geeks that stay in a corner without human interaction tend to get laid off first too, because no one knows what they are doing.
Pair programming is for newbs who can't get the work done on their own.