Posted inExperience / Information Technology

Too Big to AGILE

seasoned_geek by seasoned_geek
mark zuckerberg meta metaverse

You won’t find a professional willing to touch AGILE with a hundred mile pole. No, getting paid to write software doesn’t make you a professional anymore than winning $20 shooting hoops at the park makes you a professional basketball player. There is a quality of skill and technique one must have. If you are “doing AGILE” you have proven to the world you don’t have it.

Roland Hughes

I have had to utter that quote so many times over the past decade. You have read how AGILE was most likely behind the 737 Max falling out of the sky. I’ve blogged about AGILE’s numerous Mega-Failures. I’ve even written a book about the how and why behind Waterfall becoming the only true Software Engineering methodology.

Still I get recruiters and companies contacting me thinking if they leave the word AGILE off the contract REQ they can spring it on me after I start. No! A real professional will pack up their shit and go home on day one if you pull that.

A Theranos Moment for Facebook

One would have to be living under a rock to have not heard about Theranos and the prison time now being handed out. Theranos is a shining example of the Heroine addiction that is AGILE.

In my latest book I have an essay by the same name as this blog post. In that essay I explain that “too big to agile” can be a system small enough to fit on your wrist or in a box that hangs on the wall. If one developer cannot keep the entire architecture design in their head for at least one week, it is too big to AGILE.

I’ve been there man. Hacking on the fly is a blast. In your early twenties you believe you are a God. Management wants you to use AGILE so they can commit accounting fraud and you take to it like a fish to water. Microsoft has convinced the entire universe that software shouldn’t actually work so just ship whatever turd poops itself out the end of the Sprint and refactor the code in a future sprint. A thousand sprints from now you might even come up with a valid architecture.

By the time you hit your late twenties you start to realize that even a good word processor needs a well thought out architecture. The architecture needs to benefit and support the UI. You need far reaching document standards so the document displays the same on every screen no matter what printer the user has. It needs to bring its fonts along so you don’t have bizarre formatting issues caused by font substitution. Keep in mind this application hasn’t even left your little bitty PC.

The Metaverse is so bad even Facebook employees won’t use it. Going to be an awful lot of AGILE hackers on the unemployment line soon too. The featured image was courtesy of the previous link in this paragraph.

You Can’t Hack at Architecture

Chicago Skyscrapers at night

You don’t build Chicago skyscrapers by hacking at a bucket of “User Stories.” Quality software and quality buildings both require actual engineering. AGILE != engineering. Engineering == Do it right the first time.

One has to gather all of the requirements. This includes the “blue sky” requirements for things ten years down the road as well as what you can deliver now. You cannot design or even choose a proper database until you know what storage capacity and throughput will be needed. One has to design and document how to create and manage system backups prior to writing the first line of code. In short, you don’t start your project until you’ve made sure the power grid and sewage system can handle it. What is true of a skyscraper is true of software.

Move Quickly and Break Things

The infamous line of the shit design behind Facebook.

With Facebook’s divisive click-bait content people will hold their nose and ignore horrible bugs just to empty their colon or cheer on some other insert-hate-group-here sock puppet. It’s not just articles speculating, it’s insiders. Quite a few of them.

That shit don’t play when you are trying to build something large that doesn’t rely on keeping frothing at the mouth nutters spewing vitriol at each other while you pump highly profitable advertisements to haters. People won’t hold their nose and ignore the fact nothing works. Without the pissed off at them factor, people won’t tolerate shit software.

The Metaverse is too big to AGILE.

Your use of AGILE has pissed off too many professional developers for any of them to come work for you no matter what you offer.

Keep using AGILE and get ready to lose another $71 Billion.

Roland Hughes started his IT career in the early 1980s. He quickly became a consultant and president of Logikal Solutions, a software consulting firm specializing in OpenVMS application and C++/Qt touchscreen/embedded Linux development. Early in his career he became involved in what is now called cross platform development. Given the dearth of useful books on the subject he ventured into the world of professional author in 1995 writing the first of the "Zinc It!" book series for John Gordon Burke Publisher, Inc.

A decade later he released a massive (nearly 800 pages) tome "The Minimum You Need to Know to Be an OpenVMS Application Developer" which tried to encapsulate the essential skills gained over what was nearly a 20 year career at that point. From there "The Minimum You Need to Know" book series was born.

Three years later he wrote his first novel "Infinite Exposure" which got much notice from people involved in the banking and financial security worlds. Some of the attacks predicted in that book have since come to pass. While it was not originally intended to be a trilogy, it became the first book of "The Earth That Was" trilogy:
Infinite Exposure
Lesedi - The Greatest Lie Ever Told
John Smith - Last Known Survivor of the Microsoft Wars

When he is not consulting Roland Hughes posts about technology and sometimes politics on his blog. He also has regularly scheduled Sunday posts appearing on the Interesting Authors blog.