Oxide and Friends Twitter Space: July 26, 2021

• Al Tenhundfeld’s Agile at 20: The Failed Rebellion
• The Agile Manifesto
• [@0:55](https://youtu.be/3tp5EtPdPwY?t=55) Adam’s experiences
• From the Agile Manifesto history > The only concern with the term agile came from Martin Fowler > (a Brit for those who don’t know him) who allowed that > most Americans didn’t know how to pronounce the word ‘agile’.
• [@6:25](https://youtu.be/3tp5EtPdPwY?t=385) > The problem with agile is when it became so prescriptive that it > lost a lot of its agility.
• [@8:06](https://youtu.be/3tp5EtPdPwY?t=486) > There’s so much that is unstructured in the way we develop software, > that we are constantly seeking people to tell us how to do it. > The answer is it’s complicated.
• Steve Yegge’s Good Agile, Bad Agile > So the consultants, now having lost their primary customer, were at > a bar one day, and one of them (named L. Ron Hubbard) said: > “This nickel-a-line-of-code gig is lame. You know where > the real money is at? You start your own religion.” > And that’s how both Extreme Programming and Scientology were born.
• [@9:15](https://youtu.be/3tp5EtPdPwY?t=555) Edward Yourdon
  • “Decline and Fall of the American Programmer” book
• [@10:26](https://youtu.be/3tp5EtPdPwY?t=626) “The principles are not all wrong. Some today even feel obvious.” > There’s also a lack of specificity, which gives one lots of opportunity > for faith healers to come in.
• [@14:43](https://youtu.be/3tp5EtPdPwY?t=883) “Something I found surprising about Agile was how rigid it became.” 
  • Dan’s perils of personal tracking methodology
  • Sun’s engineers connecting directly with customers
• The Agile Ceremonies. (an ultimate guide) 
  • Sprint Planning, Daily Stand-Up, Sprint Review, Sprint Retrospective
• [@20:48](https://youtu.be/3tp5EtPdPwY?t=1248) “I think we overly enshrine schedule estimation. If there are any unknowns it becomes really hard.” > I think there’s a Heisenberg principle at work with software: > you can tell what’s in a release or when it ships, but not both.
• [@23:25](https://youtu.be/3tp5EtPdPwY?t=1405) Tom Killalea talks to success stories he’s seen with Agile 
  • Building S3 at AWS
• [@28:31](https://youtu.be/3tp5EtPdPwY?t=1711) Sprint planning and backlogs 
  • Big work chunks, responding to changing priorities
• [@33:39](https://youtu.be/3tp5EtPdPwY?t=2019) Success or failure of an Agile team? 
  • “Do demos and retrospectives”
  • Unknowns in software development make estimation hard
• [@39:11](https://youtu.be/3tp5EtPdPwY?t=2351) Dan’s experiences 
  • Personal Software Process, Team software process, Software Engineering Institute > Some people really benefit from the level of rigidity that is set out > by these processes. Prior to that, they just weren’t having > these conversations with their sales team, product owners, etc.
  • Construction analogies, repeatability.
  • Self-anchored suspension bridge
• [@46:40](https://youtu.be/3tp5EtPdPwY?t=2800) Software as both information and machine. 
  • Consultancies, repeatability, incremental results.
  • “For each success story, there are many failures.”
  • Manifesto as a compromise between different methodologies
  • Silver Bullet solutions, cure-alls. See Fred Brooks’ (1987) “No Silver Bullet” paper
• [@51:18](https://youtu.be/3tp5EtPdPwY?t=3078) Demos: “Working software is the primary measure of progress.” 
  • Experimentation and iteration
  • No true Scotsman fallacy
  • What does Agile even mean anymore?
  • “Letting people pretend to agree while actually disagreeing, but then going off and building working software anyway.”
• [@59:45](https://youtu.be/3tp5EtPdPwY?t=3585) Ed Yourdon and the Y2K problem

• Maybe there are too many Agile books already.

• Tom Killalea conversation with Werner Vogels 
  • AWS development

• Agile is more like a guideline than a target to hit.

• Consistent team composition over time
• “Soul of a New Machine”: trust is risk

• The answer can’t be “you’re doing it wrong.”

• How do you know if it’s working for your team?