My crazy wacko conspiracy theory - software development is just a really weird discipline, most of the people in the field are bad at it, and it doesn’t have the same amount of standardization and regulation that other engineering fields have, so doing it “right” looks a lot fuzzier than doing, say, civil engineering “right”.
The biggest thing though is that most people are bad at it. It’s really hard to evaluate high level organizational concepts like waterfall vs. agile when we still have developers arguing over the usefulness of unit tests.
I so agree with you. Especially that software engineering is not like actual engineering. Ironically that’s the first point of the agile manifesto - is all about the people and interactions, not the tools and processes. That’s why I’m leery about these grand claims about agile failures when half the time they mean scrum and just doing scrum isn’t agile (see point one of the manifesto)
I think it’s more that they are trying to solve the problem by changing the dev team processes, when the biggest factor of success is developing the RIGHT thing. But since most tech managers have risen up from the ranks of devs, and they have a hard time understanding that other people have valuable skills they don’t, they have no idea how to hire good designers and refuse to listen to them when they happen to get one.
My crazy wacko conspiracy theory - software development is just a really weird discipline, most of the people in the field are bad at it, and it doesn’t have the same amount of standardization and regulation that other engineering fields have, so doing it “right” looks a lot fuzzier than doing, say, civil engineering “right”.
The biggest thing though is that most people are bad at it. It’s really hard to evaluate high level organizational concepts like waterfall vs. agile when we still have developers arguing over the usefulness of unit tests.
I so agree with you. Especially that software engineering is not like actual engineering. Ironically that’s the first point of the agile manifesto - is all about the people and interactions, not the tools and processes. That’s why I’m leery about these grand claims about agile failures when half the time they mean scrum and just doing scrum isn’t agile (see point one of the manifesto)
I think it’s more that they are trying to solve the problem by changing the dev team processes, when the biggest factor of success is developing the RIGHT thing. But since most tech managers have risen up from the ranks of devs, and they have a hard time understanding that other people have valuable skills they don’t, they have no idea how to hire good designers and refuse to listen to them when they happen to get one.