494 karma · joined July 1, 2010
(after some discussion she was hired and everyone was happy)
like I said in the beginning of the discussing the manifesto reverenced to those type of environments.
Sadly I have seen work packages delivered to software teams without any context just specs. Sadly I have worked and seen projects that went down the documentation rabbit hole and spend years trying to come up with the ideal spec before any thing has been build. (and I'm not even that old). You would see that kind of stuff with in government but also large enterprise and even at mid sized companies. And it still exists today
I also have seen successful waterfall projects and I have seen failed agile projects (although those tent to fail faster and thus less costly)
The agile way is not the only way, there are instances that other ways of working might be better.
But for me personally the best work experiences where all companies that worked agile or where transitioning to agile. I worked this way (and helped in the transition) at companies ranging from scale ups to big enterprise.
A many a time I have had these same discussions with people at the beginning of a transition. Mostly people that never worked this way or had a bad experience.
If you work in an old school environment where you get work packages and you just have to do the work. You will need more documentation. simply because you can't ask any questions to the requestor.
Value is not only measured at the end of a total delivery. So for instance your car example. It could be really valuable to deliver the ABS part of the software to test it and any other safety and control functions. All these functions can get tested before the whole is delivered. If some less important features might not make it in time before the car launch you could decide to bring the car to market with the most important features and add the farting feature with an OTA update
"That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more"
I have had many discussions with both agilest and let's say traditionalist about these statements. funnily enough people from both "sides" sometimes mis interpet (or at least that is my view) the statement as; agile means no documentation. To me it is about just enough documentation. You should know what needs to be build, what you expect from it etc.
But in the end it is better to have working software than to have piles of documentation. So there is value is having documentation but the end goal is working software.
If you are old enough you remember months and sometimes years spend at documentation, scribbling over details, etc. At the end of the documentation phase they started building, than a building phase that could take months or years. After the building phase they found out the things that seemed handy at the time where not working in real life or where obsoleet. So a analyst should create a RFC which again would take lots of time before it would finally be made
The idea of having working software over comprehensive documentation is that it is better to start building the most important feature(s) and release it as soon as possible. This makes sure you add value as soon as possible. Documentation by it self doesn't add value, but working software does. This doesn't mean that the important feature should not be documented, but it should be documented enough to add value as quickly as possible. That way you get feedback from the users and change what is needed instead of talking for days about what something should do and what problems might arise from some theoretically edge case. Also it makes prioritisation much easier. Maybe an edge case can be tackled by a change of process in state of a difficult software solution. thus having time to work on a feature that adds more value
Due to badly run prince2/PMI projects people are allergic to anything remotely sounding like a project. So I get the autor when he thinks of ATO == PMO == PMI == waterfall == nightmare. But for larger organisation you will properly need something like a ATO to be successful. Like anything else a badly run, top down driven ATO will fail and make life difficult for anyone involved (this is also made clear in the original McKinsey article).
From my experience it depends on the company culture, leadership and the way agile is implemented and started with in a company.
Big companies with very old and complex architectures coupled with old school separation of business and IT and a bag of bureaucracy. Will properly need a PMO, or SAFe like implementation. Sometimes they are in luck and they are able to start with departments or a business units and move faster. But even if you have that the wider organisation will lag heavily. Most if not all can't become agile in an instance with implementing the perfect agile way of working. Even transforming to an agile organisation is best done in an agile way.
The thing is that they do their best to make sure that they do as little as possible of server side processing. Tasks like sorting photos, face recognition is all done locally as to ensure misusage and ending up with a big database of all sorts of data.
They have chosen to do the same route with a very specific set of content checking. of course this tech can be used in malicious ways (banning books and what not) but if you live in a country that has a government like that, best is not to trust any device that comes with software preinstalled anyway
And suddenly I remember that Apple is playing by Chinese rules in china any way.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/17/technology/apple-china-ce...
"Apple’s system is less invasive in that the screening is done on the phone, and “only if there is a match is notification sent back to those searching”, said Alan Woodward, a computer security professor at the University of Surrey. “This decentralised approach is about the best approach you could adopt if you do go down this route.”
So it will only happen when you upload data to the iCloud. So the question is then: is it okay for apple to make sure no illegal content is stored on its servers? I think you could argue both ways but to me at least it is less privacy invasive than it seems.
it is about expectations of privacy, in the same way you can expect less privacy in a public space in the real world. It should be clear by now that you can expect less privacy on the public web. Of course a counter argument is that is is perhaps more like renting a hotel room than it is a total public space. But you can also expect less privacy in a hotel room than you can expect in your own home.
For many years privacy and freedom of speech has been a hallmark feature of the internet. I was (kinda still am) a big proponent of this. But we have seen what will happen if you take it to its extreem. From disinformation campaigns to illegal activities. So to me (and incidentally Facebook) we should get better (inter)national rules about how we want to use the public space of the internet. Just in the same way we have rules and laws in public space.
Internet is blending more and more in to the real world. So governments should make it clear in what way we can expect privacy and free speech and where we can expect it (self hosting, public platforms etc) and what responsibilities companies have to enforce it.
The hardline arguments of privacy advocates are the same that the NRA is using to prevent any form of gun control. It starts with A what is them going to prevent to do B. Well rules, regulations and laws. You should be very aware that privacy isn't watered down and law enforcement should make sure they don't mis use what rules there are. But to me checking hashtags for know child abuse photos is the same as doing a basic background check before giving someone an assault weapon
That being said it will stop no one from encrypting images before uploading it to iCloud.
The nice thing of money in its current form is its relative stability. I can go out and buy or sell something without having to think about the value of the currency. This is not possible with bitcoin because the more it will be used its value will get higher due to the fact there are only so much bitcoins. So if it represents more value the value of the coin must go up
To make it usable for trading (shopping or otherwise) it must hold a relative stable value. But if it is stable it is no longer of interest for speculation. This will mean that speculators will move their money out of bitcoin and thus it will reduce value. rinse and repeat.
Bitcoin it self doesn't give interest or pays a diffident so the only way of making money is to ensure someone wan't to pay more for it than you did. It doesn't have any practical usability. You can't make a neckless from it, you can't use it in electronics. of course no currency gives you interest of diffident but due do the fact that that in a stable country the currency is stable it is an attractive intermediate. of course people make money with trading currency but that is done based on global economics and the state of the region or country that is responsible for the currency.
The reason why it is good to be able to print money is that if output rises and thus more value is created you can keep the value of the currency more or less the same.
The idea of having a none government run currency to make sure it is not manipulated is focusing on the symptoms and not focusing on the issue. the symptom is misuse of power the issue is not enough accountability of government (and thus banks etc).
For instance explain the concept of MVC. I have interviewed candidates that only could explain where they would put certain code based on the framework they used but could not explain the design pattern nor why they would put the code where they said the would. these types of questions will give you some insight if someone is able to reason about code and explain why they prefer some style over the other.
So you should be able to criticize the king/ president but does it mean you should say anything that pops in to your mind? Defending racist and other hate speech with the first amendment is a banalisation of the first amendment.
Scrum is actually used to make sure the dev team is part of the decision process and there is no reason not to be innovative But of course the enterprise can kill all things good
Edit: created #agile was thinking of trying to create a agile focused HN and 1 minute later this came along :-). Anyway if this doesn't work out; DM me if you are interested in starting something like a agile focused HN. Looking a bit more fore the business / change management side of things instead of the SE side of things.
Or if this already exists please point me to it :-)