"Agile Methods The Good, the Hype and the Ugly," Bertrand Meyer
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN recommends it as a sober critique of agile, though one commenter found it mixed.
What it is
Bertrand Meyer's ACM webcast giving a critical look at agile methods, separating good ideas from hype and from practices he thinks damage projects. It is based on his book on the same subject.
Recommended by 2 HN commenters across 3 different months, 2018 to 2024.
What Hacker News said
Strong rec DanPristupov · 2018-10 · on “Ask HN: What are some of the best technical talks you've heard?”
Here are some of my favorites: How To Design A Good API and Why it Matters [LINK] Agile Methods The Good, the Hype and the Ugly [this video]
Strong rec rramadass · 2021-03 · on “Ask HN: Do you think Agile/Scrum is beneficial for software delivery?”
Agile/Scrum in limited doses to aspects of Software Development is basically common sense. Applying it mechanically to the entire Product/Project Development life cycle is dumb. The "Agile Manifesto" is just well known platitudes. Agile!: The Good, the Hype and the Ugly by Bertrand Meyer is a must read. Summary: [LINK] Webcast: [this video]
Recommends rramadass · 2024-01 · on “Niklaus Wirth, 1934-2024: Geek For Life”
What you say has been well known and that is why techniques like Barry Boehm's "Spiral Model" - [LINK] were invented long ago. But "Incremental Design"/"Refactoring" as practiced by XP/Agile/Scrum crowd is not that at all. It is giving up on "Upfront Design" altogether because Requirements/Design is subject to change anyway. The fact that you will have unknowns should not be an excuse to not come up with a blueprint i.e. Design for the overall system. The focus should be on the long-term with decisions/allowances/techniques made for extension/maintainability/refactoring within the blueprint. That is the point of "Upfront Design". The XP/Agile/Scrum crowd have effectively thrown the "baby out
Critical theptip · 2020-07 · on “Cold Showers: For when people get too hyped up about things”
> Agile Methods: The Good, the Hype and the Ugly (Video) ( [this video] ) Thoughts on this one? I found the presentation to be somewhat mixed. I found the initial comb through of the agile principles to be needlessly pedantic ("'Simplicity... is essential' isn't a principle, it's an assertion!"); anyone reading in good faith can extract the principle that's intended in each bullet of that manifesto. The critique of user stories (~35 mins in) was more interesting; it's something we've been bumping up against recently. I think the agile response would be "if your features interact, you need a user story covering the interaction", i.e. you need to write user stories for the cross-product of your fea