February – 2016 – Aruberusan

Agile and Scrum – should they die?

2016-02-04Albert Zenkoff 2 Comments

If you did not yet read the article “Why Scrum Should Basically Just Die In A Fire” by Giles Bowkett, you should. That is a great discussion of various key points in Scrum methodology and the shortcomings in nearly all of its implementations in real world. I have been meaning to write up a bit of my own criticism of Agile and Scrum the way it is usually implemented today but this guy pretty much nails it down.

I don’t know personally the guys who actually put together the first definition of Agile, but I think they did not mean it to be the spectacular failure it is in too many companies today. They certainly meant to concentrate on getting working software faster and with less distraction from endless meetings that bogged down software development in the nineties. They did not mean to make management lose the long-term perspective and focus on the immediate short-term “productivity” at all times.

The mechanistic approach that is now given to us under the name of “Agile” and “Scrum” does not benefit the software development. All these story points, stand-ups, short runs – they do not promote the important part of software …
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Computing in the Cloud – is it like banking?

2016-02-02Albert Zenkoff 1 Comment

I hear often comparison of IT and computing in the cloud with other “commodities”. Some people say, well, we do get the water and electricity centrally, why would we not get the computing centrally as well? There could be suppliers of computing power that one could use over the network and then one would not need to actually invest into own computing infrastructure. You would just send the data and the required operations into the cloud and get back results.

This is very much how the mainframes worked in the old days, you know? You would have a large computer somewhere in a computer room and you would connect to it from a terminal and submit tasks. The mainframe would compute your tasks and provide the answers. It seems pretty much the same familiar concept now all over again. But, wait, is it? In the old days, your mainframe would be inside the organization, it would still be under your control completely, the data would never leave the building, so to say. Yes, it could be physically in a different location but it would remain within the same company, university or whatever organization actually owned the mainframe. That is not …
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