While Agile may be good at the same time it received lot of criticisms . Agile is a concept already 30 years old, and it may be good but if you twist the rules or does not follow them at all then it brings more harm than good. Many incompetent managers are adopting this fuss without any understanding. On the other side the managers, who get it, can deliver amazing results.
Lately I saw lot of incompetence and it is really frustrating. On the stand-up meetings people sit and have a cozy time. On these meetings people talk only to the manager and squad leaders take orders from the small dictators called managers.
All the theory , however excellent ( I believe Agile is a pretty interesting and perhaps already outdated approach and if you don't understand it, it causes more harm than good) does not help if programmers (developers) are treated like dirt and don't use adequate tools to get the job done.
Many times we spend 50% of our productive time on presentations talking about the new silver bullet and listening to nonsense like "we don't need a team of great individuals , rather we need a great team of individuals". Go and figure .
Tools...developers are going thru all those seminars and look excited while they know nothing will change. How can you be Agile if you still use donkeys instead of cars to do the job.
For example : I know a case where developers are working on a mobile project involving iOS, Android but also a web based part of the app. Besides the fact that "everybody has to know everything, we are Agile" (it means you have to know web based front end , ASP, back end, to be database expert, master javascript and all existing framework, master Objective-C, Java, C#, C, C++, CSS, HTML, iOS, Android, ASP.net , Linux, OSX, Windows and you have to be able to rotate quickly, we are Agile!!) .
According to some managers, who only want to appease their breadgivers, you have to do all the above and still using elephants instead of using more modern tools.
Here comes an example: some teams are using MacBooks to work on iOS projects. Of course because they have to be "knew it all" people, they also need to have a webserver (IIS) running on virtual windows running in the Mac so the company has not to spend money for extra laptops.
It is actually an excellent idea , I do it myself, but I have a good hardware...
Other less fortunate people are using a Mac with a crawling 500 GB harddrive which it is almost full and thus slow. Some of developer are using 4GB of RAM (or at least 8GB) and running a iOS debugger, an iOS simulator, IIS on virtual server and watching the Tube.. (work related videos of course..:). As a result the Mac becomes slow, overheated and as a very result it is failing to work... Buy hey, we have some Agile seminars today so Mac will have time to cool down.
Any excellent theory is not good if there is not a sufficient infrastructure to support it.
Upgrade to 1GB DDS, use at lease 16GB and try to convince managers (who sometimes are detached from reality) to make IT people network run faster, fix proxies that does not allow many time to go to professional websites to do the research etc. etc.
Only upgrading Macs can speed up things 4-5 fold. And the bucks to pay is much less than the price of work time otherwise lost. After upgrading Mac you can take on crawling network ....
Happy Agile!!!
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