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Comment by danblick | Hacker News Reader

Okay. I'm not a zealot about these things, but I think the author underappreciates the nicer aspects of agile. My favorite book on agile looks at it from a mathematical / risk management / process model standpoint.

https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Principles_of_Produ...

The concepts used in the book - batch size, uncertainty, feedback, control, queue size and latency - these really are useful things to think about when scheduling work.

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That said, it seems the author is making a larger point than the efficacy of any individual methodology: Convincing people to co-operate within any reasonable methodology/framework has the larger effect than effects of different methodologies. That having a religion/philosophy is more important than which religion/philosophy in terms of national co-operation, etcetera.

He freely admits he has never read anything about any of this or made a serious study of it, or had to implement any of it. It is more of a perspective or list of observations from life in the trenches than a serious study or even a very informed position. The whole list of methodologies even mentioned in the article is just three: waterfall, hacking, agile.

I second your recommendation. Any product manager or engineering manager who hasn't read that book is probably working on the basis of many flawed assumptions and optimizing for the wrong metrics.

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