This is because your average BA or project manager have long gotten away with blaming programmers for missed deadlines. If you’ve worked both sides of the fence you know the users only vaguely know what they want, the BA role is essentially an incredibly lazy one (I made a wrong ticket but nobody knows it’s wrong until UAT so who gives a fuck about making them right). No matter how your sprint is organised or how many stupid ceremonies you insist on, if you can’t be arsed doing the hard work of specification the whole process is pointless.

I truly hope AI starts doing 100% of the coding so that the tide properly goes out on this farce.

Basically you end up with something resembling a cargo cult, with all the rituals still there, but the tightly coupled feedback loop is missing.

Quick question: There's some sort of minor UAT ~once a week (or per whatever your cycle is), RIGHT? And then you find out umpteen things wrong (with the software and with the specs) , and you fix them; RIGHT?

If you have an actual commissioning or final UAT at the end of your project, it's just a formality with cake RIGHT?

Else how is that even agile? :-P

My contention is not “holding it wrong”, my contention is that it’s irredeemably flawed because the nature of it puts 99% of the actual (not fabricated) work and responsibility solely on developers, making the project manages and BA useless noise you have to fight just to get anything finished.

Extreme Programming, RUP, Spiral Model, RAD, DSDM, probably some variants of CMMI, ISO 9001 , we can continue this list for a while or even get into other disciplines. Each time you start out with a real feedback loop doing real work, and in the end everyone has cargo culted it. Mostly because a lot of people don't grok what feedback loops are, and think they can leave 'em out. I'm not even sure the project managers and BAs are the only ones to blame here. The whole organization conspires to replace scary feedback (and it really is scary!) with comfortable processes. Users don't want to talk to devs. Devs don't want to ship half-baked things. Managers need predictability for their spreadsheets. Everyone gets the cargo cult they deserve. "We mostly just took the good parts" := We left out the active ingredient.

After a while someone comes along with this radical new invention: "let's ACTUALLY apply a feedback loop", and here we go again.

To be fair, it DOES work for a while. you can start out dressing in drag and doing the hula[1] for all I care, so long as you iterate and run a feedback loop! At some point you'll actually successfully build a million dollar product anyway. .... Of course people will then copy you and dress in leaf skirts and dance all night long, and THEIR projects all fail.

This has been "Kim's overly oversimplified history of innovation in development methodologies". You're welcome, I'm sure.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Etkws_5mexg

> lot of people don't grok what feedback loops are

or they grok it very well, esp. the scary part..

Very few people want/enjoy negative feedback. On ANY level, bottom to top, the higher, the less probable to like/take it, esp. from underlings. Because that needs understanding of common goal at very different level, and incentives aren't aligned that way. Maybe in tiny companies / teams-left-on-their-own , corrective feedback works. for a while. But scaling it?

> We left out the active ingredient.

yea, thrown out the baby with the dirty water. In most cases last decade, i am only seeing rituals without essence, "monkey-policy" style. But i have not seen much dedication either, people want to get-on-with-their lifes, and doing work is just a vehicle

Just to be sure, I'm talking closed loop control, right?

Observe current state, compare to desired state, figure the difference, act to reduce the difference, repeat until current state is close enough to desired state within tolerance. How else do you close the gap reliably?

Very important concept in tech (lots of control theory), biology (neural closed loop control), business (pdca), and military (ooda, guided weapons) . Some places it does work, FAA has Just Culture with blameless post-mortems; that works. Boyd had to fight for it, but military do have OODA in a lot of their theory now. Demming's PDCA is of course famous because of the japanese companies applying it (and then people started copying the idea and it didn't always work :-P) . But... people do keep missing the secret of tightly monitored closed loops and instead use ritualized open loops.

Agile started out the same way: plan on a short horizon, check how well you're adhering to it, improve both the planning process and the process under control, wash rinse repeat until you're on target.

What's the best way to have a sane system? I'm not sure. I personally lost all faith in democracy.

A start that would not require big changes to our existing system would be open primaries. That would incentivize moderate candidates. Or perhaps eliminate primaries altogether and go with a two-stage general election like some places have for their local elections. Everybody runs, then the top two run against each other (unless one got an outright majority in the first run). Skip the more elaborate instant-runoff styles of voting because that is too advanced for average people.

Huh? If there's one thing that Argentina did correctly that no other Latin American country under military regimes in the past century did, it was breaking the political power of the military. Most members of the National Reorganization Process died in jail, the army was greatly downsized and culturally reprogrammed and it strengthened civilian institutions. It worked well until it didn't (and the breaking point happened before Milei, to be entirely clear).

But the point is that the issue lies elsewhere. Do you think Australia won't lurch to the anti-liberal and anti-democratic side as soon as someone with the right combo of charisma and psychopathy arises?

I know how it will happen. Nearly every single veto power group will give them a free pass. Naïve humanist liberals will pontificate about the ideals of democracy and freedom to do whatever you want. Boring fence-sitters will legitimate their discourse and ideas under the veil of neutrality and objectivity. Those who worship Ba'al will seek to build a symbiotic relationship. And before you realize it, White Australia has risen up once again.

Indeed, all of our friendly western liberal democracies should not get too comfortable thinking this insanity won't come to them. Some of them already experience increasing amounts of it, and the rest could easily be in that position.

The other half is that Kissinger was a smart and cunning piece of shit, and Trump is an absolute imbecile.

And thank god for that, at least. He is too stupid to make his petty policies more durable, instead relying on methods that are just as trivial to undo as they were to implement in the first place. We would be in a much worse place if he had the cunning of Kissinger.

Having said that, I’ve changed the way I work too: more focused chunks of work with tight descriptions and sample data and it’s like having a 2nd brain.

The Neo is such a perfect replacement and easier than fixing the Air.

In fact, depending on the model, the battery replacement may well have also entailed replacing the whole top cover (including the keyboard).

Especially not very large ones like in a laptop.

If you were a legal secretary WordPerfect was near irreplaceable in a market where the user had transitioned from a typewriter only 5 years ago. Non technical users who has mastered mail merge in WordPerfect would rather beat you up and leave you in the gutter for dead rather than look at Word.

Lotus users were just as fanatical. It’s probably lost to the mists of time but Lotus could be had for Sun workstations and some users who hit the limit of MS-DOS with Lotus switched to that. It was nuts the things people built with that: prop trading in Lotus on a Sun? Why not.

I’d like to see this blogger do Lotus Notes but I suspect unless you’d actually seen the crazy that Notes developers went to you wouldn’t really understand why it elicited audible groans from pre sales staff when they heard the client was a big Notes user but “was running into problems”.

1-2-3 was damn cool though, Notes was written by devils simply to drive men mad.

When I was manager of a Macintosh network in the early 2000's, we were forced by corporate to use Lotus Notes. Not a single person enjoyed using it, and nobody on my team enjoyed servicing it.

Secondly, as someone who spent 15 years working with Lotus Notes, I can assure you that you can run it standalone. Obviously it makes no real sense for a Groupware product, but it can be done. To the Notes client opening a database locally or on a mail server is largely the same.

The main issue is that people used Notes to communicate and collaborate. So you could just go creating new Address Books, Discussion databases, Document Libraries and so on, but what exactly are you proving with that? It's be like just firing up the Microsoft Mail client and only looking at the address book...

Whilst I'm aware that there's plenty in Notes that people didn't like, I do think that there are some gems hidden in there which it would have been nice to have kept. The Notes dialect of Rich Text had a couple of niceties (programmable buttons, collapsible/expandable Sections). The database engine itself was unparalleled at the time, and in some ways it still hasn't been bettered.

But the issue remains that you'd need to set up a Notes/Domino Server (depending on your version - 4.5 onwards it's called Domino), and a small network. And that's a ball-ache that nobody wants. It can speak IPX/SPX and NetBIOS, so it doesn't have to be as complicated as TCP/IP, but it's still a lot of prep work before you even get to start looking at the usage. :-(

That having been said, I was a Principal Certified Lotus Professional on the Sysadmin track for about three versions of Notes, from 4.6 to 6, and can definitely help if you ever did want to do that. Feel free to email me at phil [at] philipstorry.net if you're ever so lacking in subjects that you feel forced into this last resort.

It would be hard to recreate the experience since it relied on a network to get the full experience. Instead of Notes maybe give Multiplan a go. Horrible Microsoft also-ran of a product but interesting to reminisce about.

The only other comparable stack of the era, maybe slightly later, would be MS Access. When you’d get a call from a prospective client who’d explain they had a member of staff leave and now nobody knows how the Access database works.

“Accidentally load bearing” is an apt term

The compromise was I developed the new software as Windows 3.0 apps and used a text-based rendering compatibility layer called Mewel that implemented the Windows API in text mode for single DOS applications. A few #ifdefs and I could compile for both Win16 and DOS Text mode. This not only allowed me to develop under Windows using the superior at the time Borland compilers, it gave the company a solid footing when the legal world finally came around and wanted Windows software - we had it finished already. Sales slowly transitioned to the Windows version and then it really took off around Windows 3.11 (Windows for Workgroups).

That company was later bought by Pitney Bowes because they were the only company with Windows compatible legal forms software for Windows. Performa (or was it Proforma - I can't remember) was the name of the software.

I remember resisting myself as a kid the change from DOS to Windows versions of apps. Practically I was more productive with my memorised key combos and found it extremely annoying to switch. I also had an Amiga background that "workbench" and mouse point-and-click interfaces in general were meant for design and authoring applications but not for documents. Coming to think of it, I still feel this way - which perhaps is why I'm so naturally inclined to use stuff like vi(m)/emacs and tiled window managers.

It will beats outlook as a mail client in a lot of ways, such as having actual usable full text search.

They were, and Excel users are just as devoted if not more so. We had many people return their shiny new mac because Excel on MacOS is not exactly like Windows. And they were mad about it.

Lotus on a Sun? Why not.

How about 1-2-3 on SCO Unix. And Wordperfect. We had a salesrep (VAR) back in the day who made some scratch in the local legal market with the pitch "why give every secretary an expensive PC when you can buy one PC and a bunch of really cheap Wyse serial terminals". Our support folks came to really hate that guy (start at "you were using a typewriter 5 years ago...now you get to learn the Unix CLI" and it only got worse).

It’s not. In a proper org the cost is the testing, the release process, the coordination, the planning, etc.

Any scope creep even if it fixes something often gets shouted at.

Learning to write code always was the easy part, learning to write good software is what takes the rest of our careers to get better at.

(Mumbling something about Talk to the hand Terminator-style here)