Re: Agile coming to our shop (supposedly)

I am on the backside of a three day conference that focused on
microservices (Cloud native technologies, actually) but Agile raised it's
ugly head because CI/CD is an integral part of microservice deployment and
CI/CD is all about agile.

I highly recommend that you read through a report found here:

https://explore.versionone.com/state-of-agile/12th-annual-
state-of-agile-report-overview (download the report in PDF....)

One of the more interesting findings was the response to the
statement:"Agile practices are enabling greater adaptability to market
conditions" Only 4% of respondents said that was true, which says a lot
about using agile to respond to the market. Since the vendor sponsoring the
conference is deep into microservices and cloud native tech, they also
admitted that their products, an ESB among them, contributes to the
complexity of a microservice solution which they felt was hampering an
agile workflow.

Features of agile have their place in "modern" development. More rapid
iteration, working more closely with the end customer, breaking the work
down into smaller pieces: All good stuff IMHO. But in my particular case,
the organization I work for has adopted a bunch of agile practices and
collaboration software ( Slack, Podio, Zoom conferencing, plus the usual
email and texting) that seems to have added even more vectors of complexity
to the development process. Give me an hour with an end user and
sketchpad any day. Nothing facilitates communication better than face to
face....

Like "microservices", the term agile has many nuances of meaning.
Balancing process and programming is the key.

Pete Helgren
www.petesworkshop.com
GIAC Secure Software Programmer-Java
Twitter - Sys_i_Geek IBM_i_Geek


On 7/20/2018 12:32 PM, Jack Woehr wrote:

Enjoying this discussion and fully support you guys.

Justin, possibly the key is great documentation and process documents.

Few managers can resist process docs (with visuals) that explain exactly
what you're doing, when, and listing benefits and risks.

They need that to cover ... something ...

On Fri, Jul 20, 2018 at 11:16 AM, Justin Taylor <JUSTIN@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

My IBMi team doesn't really follow a development model. Each dev has

their own unofficial set of apps and practices.

My favorite idea from Agile is incremental releases, something I've been
doing since before hearing about Agile. I have seen strong resistance to
incremental releases from Windows devs and management. Our Windows team
is
dead-set on epic releases. I've also had managers get very irate when I
do
incremental releases. They're adamant for all-or-nothing.



-----Original Message-----
From: Dan [mailto:dan27649@xxxxxxxxx]
Sent: Thursday, July 19, 2018 9:53 PM
To: RPG400-L@xxxxxxxxxxxx; Midrange Systems Technical Discussion <
midrange-l@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: Agile coming to our shop (supposedly)

(Cross-posted to RPG & Midrange lists)

So, our newish manager threw out this bone at a recent team standup. I
have no experience with Agile, although early in my tenure at a large
insurance company, our iSeries folks worked in the same office as the web
dev team, which was described to be full-on Agile. They were also known
as
the Agile team, so there's that.

I remember reading this thread 5 years ago:
https://archive.midrange.com/rpg400-l/201310/msg00393.html
Never gave it much more thought, since it has never come up in that time.

I'm not sure where the impetus for trying to "implement" Agile is coming
from. This company has always treated IT as a liability. The tenured i
developers here feel that they are set up to fail, with new overhead
responsibilities but with the same tight deadlines to get projects
completed. Any new "philosophy" like Agile will be met with
Superman-strength resistance. I laughed when I read about "paired
development", cuz heads would explode if that were ever tried here. The
tenured devs and the new contractors they just recently brought on are
absolute old-school, monolithic developers, for whom 2000+ lines of
mainline code are standard fare. Service programs are avoided like the
plague. I developed a service program last year with functions that
could
be used in almost every day development, but I am the only one who uses
them.

I am curious if there are any old-school iSeries shops with "heels dug
in"
devs who have attempted to "implement" any part of the Agile philosophy,
and how that went.

- Dan

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