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I've always had a hard time taking the whole "agile" movement seriously given that, in my experience, velocity and agility have SO MUCH MORE to do with the software's architecture than how work is planned. [1/7]
"Waterfall" exists to hedge against the risk of making a mistake. We know this isn't very effective though as often the biggest risks are unearthed during the construction process itself. [2/7]
But the capital-A industry pushes the notion that, if we just tighten the loop, then we can move 10X faster. The big assumption they don't like to talk about, however, is that the software *itself* must be highly malleable for agile practices to move the needle AT ALL. [3/7]
In reality most software is quite brittle and dumping agile practices onto a team working in these conditions pushes them further down the path to total gridlock. [4/7]
It's yet-another-cargo-cult. Management sees Facebook shipping every day, and think that they can just decide to do that, but don't understand that AT LEAST a third of Facebook's engineering efforts are invested in making this possible at scale. [5/7]
Microservices is the engineer's equivalent of this bolt-on-velocity cargo cult. They read the first 10% of the thinkpiece and come away believing a network hop will forever eliminate coupling across domains, freeing them to move fast. Oh, sweet summer child. [6/7]
If agility isn't baked into the software's design, it doesn't matter how masterful your Scrum is, it ain't gonna happen. It usually takes a rewrite of some form to get there, and y'all know how those typically go. [7/7]
