We are Agile!


  • area_pol

    Some time ago I outlined a convoluted bugfixing process in a certain Korean corporation. Now, let's dig into the details.
    First, let's get one thing clear: the process is Agile, and the authors put emphasis on it:

    0_1464367408385_header.png

    With that out of the way, it's time to explore the wondrous issue tracking system. The only way to find and inspect a ticket is to know its id. There is no other method of searching/filtering. What's the fastest way to close a bug? Loose its id! When you finally open one, you are greeted with quite a few tabs with tons of useful information:

    0_1464367578352_d1.png
    0_1464367971520_d2.png

    Wait, you can't read Korean and you don't know what the bug is about? Well, fuck you - you should have learned, you uncivilized barbarian! You might notice quite a few fields are blank. Why? Nobody knows what they are for. And those filled? Nobody knows what they mean, too. I mean, I can't read what the bug is about, but I'm sure glad some checksum is 0x124d.
    I want to point you to the State field. As with most agile systems, tickets usually have states like "in progress", "opened", "done", etc. But that's not agile enough, no sir! Our tickets must have a richer life:

    0_1464367820905_s1.png
    0_1464367833199_s2.png
    0_1464367839634_s3.png
    0_1464367846416_s4.png

    If you want to do something with your bug, you have to consult this unambiguous manual (made in Excel, of course), so you won't break the agile process.
    But, I digress. Let's look at some other tabs, shall we?

    0_1464367995389_d3.png

    Some kind of design and impact analysis. That could have been useful, but in agile, nobody does design and analysis anyway.

    0_1464368065191_d4.png
    0_1464368155390_d5.png

    This is a fun tab. Cause category is required and you have a combo with quite a few options. Depending on what you choose, some fields become required. It is customary to choose the one which has the least fields required, as you can see in this example.

    0_1464368171175_d6.png

    Notes. This actually is the only useful thing in the entire system (and beautifully styled too). It's the only way for people to actually ask questions about the ticket, and discover what it's all about.

    0_1464368252088_d7.png

    Code review - the obvious one. Or is it? You might notice there's no code here. So how does one do a review? By attaching a Word document of course!

    0_1464372890881_d9.png
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    0_1464368309945_d9.png
    0_1464372917326_d10.png
    0_1464368326588_d10.png

    So much useful information! For example, you can choose what impact your change has, and did it pass verification. Nothing prevents you from sending a "maximum effect, reject" change, because why not. You can also put in people who participated and not, if for whatever reason you choose to list those few billion people who didn't participate in the review. And that cooperation rate score...
    In appendix 2 you might notice something which looks like a (pixelized) diff. That's your code. Each patch goes to the best SCM software in existence - Word.
    Moving on.

    0_1464368601534_d8.png

    You can attach files! But not a coredump - you have a special text field for that in the bottom.

    And, ladies and gentlemen, that's how you make software the Agile way in the biggest startup in the world!



  • This is horrifying.

    Part of me hopes no one will actually use this long term. That actual people on the ground will find ways to work around the red tape. But that's probably just wishful thinking.

    BTW, what's the translation button on the first two screenshots? That gives you the english version of the ticket?



  • *Please write in clear sentences. Do not make comment composed of dots, spaces and numbers.

    💩 💩 💩 would be a valid code review comment.

    Make us proud.


  • area_pol

    @cartman82 said in We are Agile!:

    This is horrifying.

    Part of me hopes no one will actually use this long term. That actual people on the ground will find ways to work around the red tape. But that's probably just wishful thinking.

    BTW, what's the translation button on the first two screenshots? That gives you the english version of the ticket?

    I actually noticed it here first time. Probably some new addition. I guess it runs some shitty translator, which spews garbage. Because ,you know, using English in the first place is too obvious.



  • nelson-ha-ha.jpg



  • @NeighborhoodButcher I know what Korean company you're talking about and you know what Korean company you're talking about, but one of your images actually contains the logo of the Korean company you're talking about-- not sure if that's intentional.

    There's a difference between "nudge nudge wink wink Korean company big on phones and TVs" and actually showing their logo on the screen.


    BTW, I fixed 3 bugs this morning in the time it'd take you to make sense of the workflow in that Excel doc.


  • Notification Spam Recipient

    @blakeyrat said in We are Agile!:

    one of your images actually contains the logo of the Korean company you're talking about

    I noticed that too....


  • area_pol

    @blakeyrat said in We are Agile!:

    @NeighborhoodButcher I know what Korean company you're talking about and you know what Korean company you're talking about, but one of your images actually contains the logo of the Korean company you're talking about-- not sure if that's intentional.

    Fixed.

    BTW, I fixed 3 bugs this morning in the time it'd take you to make sense of the workflow in that Excel doc.

    The funniest are those kinds of changes which involve few minutes of work, and an hour to fill that damn bugtracker, and another day or more to actually get the ticket closed. You can even see this in that random review report - 5min code review, 3h digging though all this crap.


  • BINNED

    @NeighborhoodButcher said in We are Agile!:

    5min code review

    See? EFL is clearly easy and was the right choice! 🚎



  • :arrows: All the :arrows:
    In all seriousness, this explains why the company hasn't issued an update to my country yet.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @NeighborhoodButcher said in We are Agile!:

    So much useful information!

    I didn't notice, but does the tracker have a place to add in an Environmental Impact Assessment? How many trees and which species of endangered frogs will be impacted by the code change? It might be critically important sometimes!!!

    (That state diagram reminds me of the time when I pulled apart the NFA diagram for a particularly complicated regular expression…)


  • area_pol

    I used to work for that certain Korean company in its Poznań office, back when it existed. We all said that the company did all us a great service by letting us go, and after working less than a year for another, much saner company, I conclude that we couldn't have been more right.

    @cartman82 You actually have to make a ticket in that very agile system in order to even be able to submit ANYTHING to the central VCS repository. Back in the day, we just had local git repos set up in the office and one person responsible (weekly Round-Robin, of course, we didn't want anybody to kill themselves) for dealing with the shit of uploading our stuff to the corporate VCS. So you can't really get out of using it. Has @NeighborhoodButcher already mentioned that, as a developer, you have no access to the system by default? And that the access request has to go through about 4-6 persons? And that you need to have access to EVERY SINGLE PROJECT approved separately? Somebody's on vacation? Well, fuck you. Do something else that day. Or week.

    Not to mention that there's a publicly accessible ini file in the repository that has a username which allows read-write access to all repositories and all projects. But I should probably keep that to myself.


  • Considered Harmful

    @blakeyrat said in We are Agile!

    Korean

    @blakeyrat said in We are Agile!

    Korean

    @blakeyrat said in We are Agile!

    Korean

    @blakeyrat said in We are Agile!

    Korean

    Damn it. Now I'm hungry.


    Filed under: Korean Barbecue, I'm not racist; I met a Korean man once.


  • Fake News

    @error I could hit some bi bim bop right now...



  • Is it just me or do half of the images link to about:blank?

    <a href="about:blank" target="_blank"><img data-state="loaded" src="/uploads/files/1464372893329-d9.png" alt="0_1464372890881_d9.png" class="img-responsive img-markdown"></a>


  • Fake News

    @Deadfast The latter.


  • Notification Spam Recipient

    @Deadfast said in We are Agile!:

    Is it just me or do half of the images link to about:blank?

    It's a glitch, refresh the page?


  • area_pol

    @strangeways said in We are Agile!:

    I used to work for that certain Korean company in its Poznań office, back when it existed. We all said that the company did all us a great service by letting us go, and after working less than a year for another, much saner company, I conclude that we couldn't have been more right.

    @cartman82 You actually have to make a ticket in that very agile system in order to even be able to submit ANYTHING to the central VCS repository. Back in the day, we just had local git repos set up in the office and one person responsible (weekly Round-Robin, of course, we didn't want anybody to kill themselves) for dealing with the shit of uploading our stuff to the corporate VCS. So you can't really get out of using it. Has @NeighborhoodButcher already mentioned that, as a developer, you have no access to the system by default? And that the access request has to go through about 4-6 persons? And that you need to have access to EVERY SINGLE PROJECT approved separately? Somebody's on vacation? Well, fuck you. Do something else that day. Or week.

    Not to mention that there's a publicly accessible ini file in the repository that has a username which allows read-write access to all repositories and all projects. But I should probably keep that to myself.

    We all were this hell, as I can see. We too had git repos, which we tried to use and keep in sync with p4 before it was made THE vcs for everything (as developers, we had no access to p4, just our PL). The funny thing back then was - the Korean team pushed some changes to git, and some to p4. In the end the two repos diverged so much, that they were unmergable. So what did the Koreans decide? They trashed git and we had to redo all fixes in p4.

    The not being able to submit a change without a Kona bug assigned was a pain. We tricked the Koreans into creating a "meta-bug" which was so obscure that we pushed all the "irrelevant" changes to it, and nobody noticed (enhancements, refactoring, code cleanup, bugs we found but were not reported, because we had no permissions to create tickets, etc.).

    Don't know if the word got to you guys, but the guy that brought your office down got a reward for doing that "the clean way". To this day I am afraid to ask what this "clean way" was.



  • @Tsaukpaetra said in We are Agile!:

    @Deadfast said in We are Agile!:

    Is it just me or do half of the images link to about:blank?

    It's a glitch, refresh the page?

    First thing I tried of course, doesn't help. Probably a new species of jellypotato because it only affects images that load after the initial post.



  • @NeighborhoodButcher said in We are Agile!:

    Don't know if the word got to you guys, but the guy that brought your office down got a reward for doing that "the clean way". To this day I am afraid to ask what this "clean way" was.

    No blood was spilled? :D



  • this agile development thing gets we tired and burned out too quickly. wiser companies are moving to endurance development and strenght development now.



  • @Deadfast That happened on my Kerbal campaign page. I just stopped posting to that thread, that was my fix.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @fbmac said in We are Agile!:

    wiser companies are moving to endurance development and strenght development now.

    I'm hoping for intelligence development and wisdom development. No sign yet…


  • BINNED

    @dkf Those have been determined to be out of scope and out of budget. We need all the funds we have put towards redoing the bikeshed in a flat design paradigm.



  • @Onyx said in We are Agile!:

    @dkf Those have been determined to be out of scope and out of budget. We need all the funds we have put towards redoing the bikeshed in a flat design paradigm charisma development for the sales drones.

    FTFY


  • area_pol

    Seems like I forgot about the desktop client for this beautiful system. You see, one blasphemy of a web bug tracker is not enough - we needed a client also. This client is a sodomized version of Eclipse, and is pretty much the same nonfunctional 💩 . But is has a unique update process. You see, in normal Eclipse, when an update is available, you get a notification, click "yes" to confirm installation, and that's it. But this wasn't Agile enough for our needs. The whole process looks like this:

    1. Check for updates and notice there's one available.
    2. Confirm installation and notice it fails horribly.
    3. Manually go to the download site and download the latest version installer.
    4. Install the latest version over you current one.
    5. Run the client and notice there's an update available.
    6. Confirm installation and wait for the updater to download and install the same latest version.
    7. Run the client again and notice there's no new version available anymore. Just like magic.
    8. Discover the updater also got you AIDS.
    9. You die.

  • Notification Spam Recipient

    @NeighborhoodButcher

    1. Your successor inherits the client after you leave and notices it's out of date, but since Agile creates a ticket to have the client updated on his machine, which necessarily needs approvals and lots of other red tape?

  • BINNED

    Serious question: why this certain Korean company is still in business, and thriving too?Incompetence should start to show sooner or later.
    I recently purchased a Note 5 for my wife, but plan to buy Microsoft phone for myself and hack it to my liking.


  • :belt_onion:

    @dse said in We are Agile!:

    Incompetence should start to show sooner or later.

    Have you used TouchWiz?

    (Substitute pretty much any KoreaCorp product)

    FWIW if you want a phone to do hacking on, I'd go Nexus not Windows. I don't think there's much hacking you can do to a Windows Phone device :)



  • @dse said in We are Agile!:

    Serious question: why this certain Korean company is still in business, and thriving too?

    This certain Korean company is pretty much everywhere in the Korean infrastructure; they do not only TVs, smart shit and computers, there are companies belonging to the same owners that do military stuff like tanks, and they build trains, too. They tend to land most state and government contracts there, I think. They look pretty much like Siemens in Germany.

    Being that, they can afford to make shit using shitty process and then mass produce whatever usable comes out to saturate markets.

    Also, the Korean supremacyâ„¢ is there all over the place. If they have a Korean employee and a foreign contractor, the Korean's opinion is everything, and the foreign contractor can shove it up his ass only because he's not Korean enough. I have this attitude confirmed from at least three independent sources, one here and two other people I know in person who had been unfortunate to work for them at some point in life.



  • The secret is that "Agile" is a sticker companies slap onto micromanagement efforts. Remember, folks: agile doesn't exist in large companies because they are large. That's by definition. Whales are not agile. Elephants are not agile. Fucking trains and jumbo jets can be fast but they can't be agile due to momentum.

    One can join an agile company that has up to 10 people in total, and that would include the cleaning lady. They must be agile to turn a profit. But you won't make a big buck with them.


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @wft said in We are Agile!:

    Remember, folks: agile doesn't exist in large companies because they are large.

    Perhaps that's true of some big companies, but it doesn't follow that everything done by big companies is by large teams with massive bureaucracies, even if it's the norm.



  • @boomzilla True, there can be small teams with massive amounts of red tape.


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @wft said in We are Agile!:

    @boomzilla True, there can be small teams with massive amounts of red tape.

    Or small teams without red tape.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @wft There can also be places where the red tape takes so long to actually be applied that the agile team gets their stuff finished before it gets stultifying.

    And some places just work by subdividing into smaller teams for nearly everything. Different type of large organisation there…


  • Trolleybus Mechanic

    @lolwhat said in We are Agile!:

    @error I could hit some bi bim bop right now...

    yum. I need to get me some stone bowls.



  • @Lorne-Kates said in We are Agile!:

    I need to get me some stone bowls.

    My brain tried to add an extra vowel to the last word of that sentence. If the bibimbap has enough gochujang, you might need them, too.


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @Lorne-Kates said in We are Agile!:

    I need to get me some stone bowls.

    Would these work?
    0_1464866623622_upload-a482ad7e-5667-4f7e-8b2d-2e532bf11793


  • BINNED

    @boomzilla
    Shouldn't you be video taping them?


  • BINNED

    @Luhmann NodeBB doesn't allow for random random playback so I guess it's not worth the effort.


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @Luhmann That's a super slow motion video that you're seeing right now. Randomized!



  • @HardwareGeek In my fridge I have about 1/3 of a jar of homemade kimchi that needs to be finished...


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