XDSD has an apparent 80% fail rate – so why is it being pushed as the new Agile? | Hacker News Reader

XDSD has an apparent 80% fail rate – so why is it being pushed as the new Agile?

voxxed.com

13 pointslarleys9 comments

> We’re planning to start a massive marketing campaign of XDSD at the end of this year. We will be the only provider of the methodology and its instruments. Thus, we are not afraid of any mis-applications. We will help companies adopt XDSD and will train and consult them. Until then, we are still in R&D mode, making final improvements to XDSD, making sure it works perfectly in commercial projects.

Wow what a cocky article. There are a number of innovative ideas but largely the author seem to be unaware that while he criticizes agile that he continues to apply many of its principals.

Believing that he will arrive at a position where it "works perfectly" is a fools errand, and having this mindset leads one away from continuous improvement and towards enforcement of a locked version of the process.

I'm interested in the experiment but would personally bet against this working. Agile isn't the reason developers he meets want highs income, personal growth and a good lifestyle, it's a reflection of the market demand for skilled, educated developers.

This is Uber for software developers.

Well, yes, the only 80% figure I can find on the article is the number of developers that can't stand it. Anyway, development practices are so bad that it does not look unusual - neither for developers breaking down, nor for project failures. But I doubt the number is really that low, there's a strong selection bias acting there.

Anyway, being pushed as the new Agile is fitting.

Seems awful. It's paying people piecemeal, and not developing a collabrative team. The developers will not give a shit about the project overall, just completing the tickets. Business people need guidance from programmers to make it all fit together.

Most of the quality control stuff, comes straight from Agile techniques. I.E Never breaking build, making sure the main code line is always ready to be deployed.

I would agree with you generally, but I always have kind of wondered if there was a way to use some sort of internal pricing/phoney currency to schedule work.

In many cases we are trying to balance how much "value" an item has with how long it will take to implement.

I wonder if project managers could place a price on item and let developers pick from a list based on how much effort they think it will take them, if we could get a more efficient system.

I believe its not an 80% project fail rate, but rather 80-85% of the programmers working this way quit.

Where did the 80% metric come from?

I've created a new process as well, people who have bugs are shot immediately. Those who live are 100% perfect. After so many decades in this industry I am still amazed at what passes for new ideas sometimes.

The submission was editorialized. Article title:

XDSD: An eXtreme New Take on Managing Distributed Developers

The article's website seems to have a 100% fail rate.

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