Mastodawn

But you can’t just not review things!

Actually you can. If you shift the reviews far to the left, and call them code design sessions instead, and you raise problems on dailys, and you pair programme through the gnarly bits, then 90% of what people think a review should find goes away. The expectation that you'll discover bugs and architecture and design problems doesn't exist if you've already agreed with the team what you're going to build. The remain 10% of things like var naming, whitespace, and patterns can be checked with a linter instead of a person. If you can get the team to that level you can stop doing code reviews.

You also need to build a team that you can trust to write the code you agreed you'd write, but if your reviews are there to check someone has done their job well enough then you have bigger problems.

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alkonaut Mar 17

This falls for the famous "hours of planning can save minutes of coding". Architecture can't (all) be planned out on a whiteboard, it's the response to the difficulty you only realize as you try to implement.

If you can agree what to build and how to build it and then it turns out that actually is a working plan - then you are better than me. That hasn't happened in 20 years of software development. Most of what's planned falls down within the first few hours of implementation.

Iterative architecture meetings will be necessary. But that falls into the pit of weekly meeting.

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2OEH8eoCRo0 Mar 17

I've worked waterfall (defense) and while I hated it at the time I'd rather go back to it. Today we move much faster but often build the wrong thing or rewrite and refactor things multiple times. In waterfall we move glacially but what we would build sticks. Also, with so much up front planning the code practically writes itself. I'm not convinced there's any real velocity gains in agile when factoring in all the fiddling, rewrites, and refactoring.

> Most of what's planned falls down within the first few hours of implementation.

Not my experience at all. We know what computers are capable of.

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zingar

Comparing the same work done between agile and waterfall I can accept your experience of what sounds like an org with unusually effective long term planning.

However the value of agile is in the learning you do along the way that helps you see that the value is only in 10% of the work. So you’re not comparing 100% across two methodologies, you’re comparing 100% effort vs 10% effort (or maybe 20% because nobody is perfect).

Most of the time when I see unhappiness at the agile result it’s because the assessment is done on how well the plan was delivered, as opposed to how much value was created.