Skip to main content
Software Engineering

You are not logged in. Your edit will be placed in a queue until it is peer reviewed.

We welcome edits that make the post easier to understand and more valuable for readers. Because community members review edits, please try to make the post substantially better than how you found it, for example, by fixing grammar or adding additional resources and hyperlinks.

Required fields*

6
  • 1
    I don't understand the increased number of big pushes as being an agile problem. Commented Mar 18, 2013 at 3:53
  • 2
    @JeffO No, it's not an agile problem. It's a management problem. From what I've seen though, companies that are heavily influenced by sales tend to gravitate to aggressive release cycles and large feature sets. Agile strategies tend to appeal to these companies (whether they truly follow the strategies or not). While I like agile development, my experience has shown that when a company calls itself 'agile', it usually means I can expect to see a fair amount of technical debt in the code base. Commented Mar 18, 2013 at 4:01
  • I guess if they have no methodology at all, they can call themselves whatever they want. Since agile, is the current buzzword, it's the most attractive. It's been awhile since I was on a waterfall project; it was such a disaster in so many other ways, that I never use it as an argument against the methodology. Commented Mar 18, 2013 at 4:42
  • In any project, agile or not, refactoring and cleaning up code is something you do as you go, to constantly keep the technical debt to a minimum. If you don't account for that in your estimations, you will have to start doing that. You can't let technical debt accrue to until you need to stop everything to fix it. Instead follow the scout rule: "Always leave the code cleaner than you found it." Commented Mar 18, 2013 at 13:00
  • In my experience, inexperienced teams starting with scrum, without observing good coding principles (like XP), can be sometimes be focused too much on functionality (stories). Instead they should say a story isn't done until the code is 'good' enough, but not everybody has enough backbone to do so under a looming deadline. And with Agile you tend to have more deadlines in a shorter time, so I do associate it with Agile methods as well, whereas I'm perfectly aware they're not the cause. Commented Mar 18, 2013 at 13:37