How a group of programming rebels started a global movemenT
Ken Schwaber—the cofounder of Scrum and founder of Scrum.org—says Waterfall “literally ruined our profession.” “It made it so people were viewed as resources rather than valuable participants.” With so much planning done upfront, employees became a mere cog in the wheel.
.. Waterfall “has gradually lost favor … because companies usually build better products if they can change specifications and designs, get feedback from customers, and continually test components as the products are evolving.”
.. Bob “Uncle Bob” Martin. Martin, an industry veteran and the founder of Uncle Bob Consulting, runs The Clean Code Blog
.. “When we compared how we did our work, we were just kind of astonished at the things that were the same.”“When we compared how we did our work, we were just kind of astonished at the things that were the same.”
.. Unlike other historical documents, the Agile Manifesto doesn’t declare truths self-evident. Rather, it compares: We value this over that.
.. Schwaber says the group did invite “a whole bunch of really pretty knowledgeable women” but that none showed. “They thought it would just be a carousing and smoking weekend,” Schwaber says. “They didn’t think we were going to do anything intellectual or productive.”
.. But it’s unclear whether women were, in fact, actually invited: A few of the framers tell me they vaguely remember some women being invited. Others don’t.
.. Unlike Waterfall, Agile emphasizes iterative development, or building software in pieces. Agile teams typically work in short cycles—which are called “sprints” in Scrum, today one of the most widely used forms of Agile—that usually last two weeks each.
.. Today’s software isn’t typically burned onto a CD-ROM and stocked on a store shelf; updates can be pushed to your laptop or smartphone remotely. This makes it easier to add features or fix bugs after releasing the product.
.. Despite discussions over whether the Manifesto itself should be amended, many of the original signers see the document as a historical—not a living—document. “It’s like a Declaration of Independence in U.S. history,” says Cockburn. “You don’t go back and rewrite that.”
.. “Now you can go to a conference, and there’s aisle after aisle of people who are selling you computer tools to run your process. And they say it’s Agile,” says Cunningham. He points to the first value of the Agile Manifesto. “It says, ‘Individuals and interactions over processes and tools.’ How did [Agile] become a process-and-tools business?”
.. The monetization of Agile aside ..
.. the “most annoying aspect right now” is that Agile “has been taken over by the project-management people,” leaving “the technical people and the technical ideas” behind.
.. Sutherland says he sees teams in Silicon Valley that claim to be Agile, but are “not delivering working product at the end of a short iteration.”
Silicon Valley’s ‘Conservative’ Problem
As tech companies in Silicon Valley seek to bolster diversity in their workplace, some employees say their politics are unwelcome in an industry dominated by liberal views. The Wall Street Journal’s Georgia Wells has more.
The End of the Social Era Can’t Come Soon Enough
It seems increasingly likely that our society will one day view our infatuation with Twitter, Facebook, and the like as a passing, often destructive fad... when I think about social media and its current domination of our society. Will a future generation look back in 10, 20, or maybe 100 years from now and wonder, mystifyingly, why a generation of humans believed in these platforms despite mounting evidence that they were tearing society apart—being used as terrorist recruitment tools, facilitating bullying, driving up anxiety, and undermining our elections—despite the obvious benefits and facilitations they provide?.. I expected to receive angry e-mails and text messages from current or former Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram employees. Instead, my inbox was flooded with former (and even current!) employees of these social networks, who confided that they felt the same way... “Whether the tech industry can move beyond mining our social anxieties to sell ads, or feeding our anger to increase engagement, may require renegotiating a new relationship between the Bay Area and the rest of the country,”.. I can’t recall the last time I looked at social media and felt happy afterwards, or even enriched by the experience... these platforms act, in many ways, like drugs... Sean Parker, one of Facebook’s earliest investors and the company’s first president, came right out and said what we all know: the whole intention of Facebook is to act like a drug, by “[giving] you a little dopamine hit every once in a while, because someone liked or commented on a photo or a post or whatever.”.. the promise of connection has turned out to be a reality of division. We’ve all watched the way Donald J. Trump used social media to drive a wedge between us all, the way he tweets his sad and pathetic insecurities out to the world.. Facebook executive told me that the biggest reason people unfriend each other is because they disagree on an issue. The executive jokingly said, “Who knows, if this keeps up, maybe we’ll end up with people only having a few friends on Facebook.”
Silicon Valley Can’t Destroy Democracy Without Our Help
But while Russian meddling is a serious problem, the current sentiment toward Silicon Valley borders on scapegoating. Facebook and Twitter are just a mirror, reflecting us. They reveal a society that is painfully divided, gullible to misinformation, dazzled by sensationalism, and willing to spread lies and promote hate. We don’t like this reflection, so we blame the mirror, painting ourselves as victims of Silicon Valley manipulation.
At the hearing, Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, squarely blamed the tech companies for Russian interference. “You bear this responsibility,” she said. “You’ve created these platforms.”
But we, the users, are not innocent. Some of the Russian propaganda on social media was cribbed from content that was posted by Americans. Yes, social media helps propaganda spread farther and faster. But Facebook and Twitter didn’t force users to share misinformation. Are Americans so easily duped? Or more alarming, did they simply believe what they wanted to believe?
.. The real crisis is Americans’ inability or unwillingness to sift fact from fiction, a problem that is worsened by the mainstream media’s loss of credibility when it comes to setting the record straight... Facebook’s algorithms may encourage echo chambers, but that’s because the company figured out what users want... The real problem is that Americans don’t have a shared sense of reality... A couple of years ago, I was part of a team that tried that very experiment. We ran a Silicon Valley start-up called Parlio, which was later acquired by Quora. Parlio aimed to be a social media platform for civil debate. But what we discovered was that people loved the idea of reasoned debate, then decided that those debates took too much time. Thoughtful content was also less likely to go viral, and many users are addicted to the sugar rush of virality. So while people liked the idea of eating their vegetables, they still gravitated to Twitter’s candy aisle.Social media platforms magnify our bad habits, even encourage them, but they don’t create them. Silicon Valley isn’t destroying democracy — only we can do that.