Hacker News Reader

Comment by codingdave | Hacker News Reader

> a 15 minute fact-to-face is better...

Good thing we have better tools for videoconferencing than ever. I can have a 15 minute face-to-face with anyone in my company, no matter where in the world they are.

View on HN

They cite this particular bit of idiocy from the Agile Manifesto:

> The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation.

They fail to realize that when it was written in 2001, communication technologies were far inferior to what we have now. So that face to face should be updated to something like "immediate" or "real time".

I actually still think face-to-face meetings are the best way to communicate. That does not, however, outweigh the disadvantages of forcing people to commute to an office.

They also fail to realize one of the most important bits of the Agile Manifesto is you're supposed to tear it apart and over time redesign it to work for your own org.

Anyone who just says "We do X, because that's how Agile recommends it" is not actually doing Agile.

What they also failed to realize, which was also true then, is that the person I need a face-to-face conversation with is neither in the desk next to me nor at my employer's site the next country over: he was in my desk last year, works somewhere else now, and didn't write anything down because Agile™ told him it wasn't ‘effective’.

This is a poor understanding of "comprehensive documentation."

You should absolutely be keeping documentation. However, you should not require hundreds of pages of specs and design documents before a single line of code is written.

Instead, documentation should be written at the same time as the code, and should follow what is actually needed for and by developers and the organization rather than being subject to a "gate".

It's about writing the right documentation. Some of that documentation is harder to write: For example, writing a specification that can literally run against the software, like in behavior driven development. (This is one of many potential tools. It may not be applicable for you.) It may look like a wiki. It may look like a set of UML diagrams and a formal spec. It depends on the team and the domain of the problem.

The problem that the manifesto was talking about was one of documentation as a deliverable that was not properly updated and only written to pass a requirement of the process.

This is a problem with reading documents without understanding the time and context they were written in. If you’re a twentysomething developer who’s never worked in a process and documentation-heavy organization, the agile manifesto will sound like it is advocating something it is not. It was a reaction to the prevailing thinking of the time.

On top of that, they were looking for brevity over writing a novel, considering that it came out of a group of like-minded people over a long weekend.

I wish the agile manifesto had included a bullet point that said 'favor working code over comprehensive documentation%'

% where working code != the code will work if all stars align and no invalid data is input and comprehensive documentation != a single typed character more than what is forced out of your tortured fingers by those who have to support your code at 2AM

I love my job :)

* "while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more" suggests that you should do enough of the items on the left such that the job gets done.

* "Build projects around motivated individuals. Give them the environment and support they need, and trust them to get the job done." implies that the ops team also needs to be given the environment and support they need from development.

* "Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design enhances agility." where "technical excellence" implies an understanding of working code that isn't dependent on valid data.

* "At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly." means that if ops can't do its job, then the development team needs to reflect and adjust its behavior accordingly.

So, sadly, they tried. We just went too far in the other direction in some organizations, and that needs to be stopped. If it isn't working, change it - agile shouldn't be in the way.

Videoconferencing is OK, but it is still common to have issues with it. Bad image quality, setup by lowest common denominator etc. Often you use that 15 minutes just by trying to make it work properly.

At least in our company, it works pretty much flawlessly. We rarely have technical issues, and if we do it's a wider outage from our conferencing provider.

Yeah, agreed. Even places I've worked with wonderful internal IT still have problem users who can't figure videoconferencing, or have damaged/misconfigured their device in a way that prevents it.

It often comes down to the one person who actually knows the specific flavor of videoconferencing walking around and fixing everything for everyone, and everyone remote just mumbling and leaving the meeting.

As I work at an Apple shop, I wish Apple would come up with some decent videoconferencing application that would work with our Apple TVs and MacOS (no, Facetime does not count, neither does Zoom and it's glaring vulnerabilities)

Video conferencing is a problem that cannot be solved with software alone. I like to call it the 'last meter problem', as video conference issues are almost always caused by crappy consumer grade equipment.

Wireless routers are the biggest culprit. Convince people to use a wired connection and be amazed how much better video conferencing suddenly becomes.

It's probably a software problem at heart though, if you include firmware level. Since VGA-connectors went out of fashion I'm still to use a projector that Just Works without having to use it 10 times before figuring out all its quirks.

This has not been my experience for years. The tech has matured greatly.

Not if you use it every day, like remote workers do. It is a standard mechanism for communication, and becomes reliable for the team.

I work remotely and have a minimum of 1 morning video meeting, often more in a day. Cannot agree with this comment. The only thing that's gotten reliable is when certain things fail we kind of know what it is from past experience. "Jim. Please plug in your headphones or mute yourself, this happens once a week. JIIIM. JIIIIIM. Can we kick Jim from the call? Who has permission to kick someone from a call here?"

To the conferencing software's credit, it's generally user error. But when you have 10 people in a call, and only 2 of them really understand or even care about their conferencing software setup, things break a lot. I have to explain the concept of changing your recording device more than once a week. Usually to the same people again and again.

Well, this is the same kind of people who just drop stupid jokes and stuff on the floor during meeting, don't care about what happens in the meeting and are generally poor coworkers.

The only problem with remote is that incompetence is much more visible.

What videoconferencing software are you using? We have this issue with some software, but Zoom has been excellent.

Funny coincidence because just few days ago I was using zoom for the first time long time. The image/sound quality for sure was crappy and it was lagging/spotty multiple times. On the other hand there was like 7 participants. I also don't like how you have to install separate app to use it - and I heard the OS X version had vulnerability issues.

When I'm hosting a video call I prefer google hangouts. Works OK without installing apps.

We just use Google Hangouts now. We rarely have meeetings with people outside our team but it always works fine.

All you need to do is standardize quality equipment so everyone on your team has a similar setup and make sure your internet connection is good.

It's a relatively simple problem to solve. The amount of conference call failures I've experienced working remotely for an all-remote team is substantially lower than when I was working in-office, despite I'm probably on 5x the number of conference calls now.

Those sound like issues with your IT department, employer, and/or video conference provider rather than issues with working from home. Any company with remote employees should require a consistent, stable solution

https://www.owllabs.com/see-it-in-action

My neighbor owns a consultancy. They’ve started shipping the Meeting Owl camera to their bigger clients to improve their meeting experience. It’s has a 360 degree camera, eight directional mics.

The camera stitches together a full view of the conference room up top, with the bottom 2/3 intelligently shifting the focus across multiple speakers. It will even put a whiteboard into the focus of the frame, if someone starts drawing. I thought it was pretty cool.

Disclaimer: I just thought the product looked cool after my neighbor mentioned it. Nothing more.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com