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"Agile Methods The Good, the Hype and the Ugly," Bertrand Meyer

Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) · 18.2K views · 2015-03-27 · 1:02:30

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Overview

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.

On Hacker News

HN recommends it as a sober critique of agile, though one commenter found it mixed.

Recommended by 2 HN people across 3 months · HN mentions 2018–2024

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What people said

rramadass · 2021-03 · Strong recommendation

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: [VIDEO]

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DanPristupov · 2018-10 · Strong recommendation

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 [VIDEO]

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rramadass · 2024-01 · Recommendation

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 with the bathwater" with the result that their methodology has degenerated to "think short-term and make shit up as you go long-term". See also Bertrand Meyer, "Agile! The Good, The Hype and The Ugly" - [VIDEO]

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Sources

Video by Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), played through YouTube.

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