The Dark Side of Agile

…or I demand that he Shoots me Now!

We talk about bit rot, and information death. But there is a corollary – fact rot, and truth death.

In the last few days I have lost large chunks of time and have experienced panic attacks, rage attacks, and loss-of-faith-in-humanity attacks.

I have reached the last station on the digital-native line and am looking at the opportunity cost of a complete technology shut down.

Why? Because of AGILE!!

We must unite, rise up, and purify every cubicle in every cloud services provider in the land of this blight.

Am I being unreasonable?

Maybe. But pity me, my descent into madness began as all such descents begin – innocently….

I decided to install Plex on a Mac Mini to watch video from my NAS. Plex has all sorts of goodies, and it’s Agile. The developers keep updating and delivering new features. They have set up forums, and implemented a freemium business model. If you want extra support you pay. It’s good software so I paid.

But I don’t really want all the goodies. I just want a good 10-foot UI which Plex has, (and Apple used to have in Front Row, but inexplicably dumped).

Plex set up nicely. But I still have quite a few DVDs of TV shows and I thought it would be nice to watch them through Plex (The 10-foot UI again.)

And there were so many helpful posts and articles about what to do an not do. And that’s where the madness began….

We talk about bit rot, and information death. But there is a corollary – fact rot, and truth death.

The Agile folk developing Plex seemed didn’t just change the feature set, they changed the nomenclature.

Once it made sense to add an application to Plex, and lots of helpful articles advised to do this, now one adds a plugin.

This seems trivial until you remember search. We don’t look up information in an index anymore, we search for it. And changing your terms fragments your information.

There is helpful and detailed configuration advice – some of it very recent – that is now completely misleading because Plex have done nothing to tidy up the ‘facts’ rotting in the online wake of their reasonably popular product.

The Plex documentation indexes, menus, and searches contain nothing to indicate the changes, nothing that flags common but out-of-date terminology, and they don’t even bother to make it obvious that the whole sorry state of affairs has been complicated by an unpublished (but known bug).

The documentation and support trail for Plex resembles the desk of an absent minded and very untidy maths professor. They know in which pile and roughly how far down an important article is. But good luck finding anything on your own.

Plex are loosing me. I can’t bear wasting my time trying to figure out something I shouldn’t have to just because people come in when I am not home to rearrange my digital furniture without telling me.

Still it’s only Plex isn’t it? It’s a niche product at best. Plex isn’t worth getting too worked up about in the overall scheme of things. I didn’t pay too much for my useless support. I will move on and get over it.

But there are bigger digital clouds out there. Companies that are harder to avoid. I was rattled by the rudeness of Plex. But then Google decided it would flip me a big Agile bird.

I can take or leave the new Home Stream interface on Google+. Yeah Agile iteration. I can deal.

What did give me pause however was the layout algorithm was invariably choosing to make all the food photos enormous (1). So I thought, time to turn down the volume on the chronic glop-posters in my circles.

Google is not too keen on us controlling what comes into our streams. You can’t hide videos or pictures. You can’t filter topics. But hey, they did provide some basic control over people and circles with the volume slider.

But no. Those sneaky Agile arseholes had been moving things around in the dark of night again.

Never mind, I thought, I will do a Google search. (Oh the irony!!)

Hmmm, lots of tech-blog posts on the new settings. Recent too. Just a couple of Months. And there were lots of official articles in the Google+ help pages as well.

Nope. Not to be.

The Agile guys had my sanity by the short and curlies and they weren’t about to let go. None of the steps matched the interface:

• There was no Circles option in the people sub menu. It was a tab now.
• When I get to the circles the setting menu isn’t there.
• The articles on Streams, on Circles, on Managing Circles, and on Stream Filtering all contained nothing on the new interfaces.
• There was no indication at all that the interface had changed.

Turns out that to get to the old volume control you have to right click on the name of a circle which will give you a settings option.

That, at the time of writing, was a thoroughly hidden and undocumented feature of Google+.

Beware, I am sure that by the time my four or five readers get to this, the Agile elves will have hidden this control in the back of the sock drawer – in a shoebox labelled “spoons”.

The changes, and the lost setting would be painful enough by itself. But what really brings on the shakes and has me reaching for Mr Blanky is that Google has done nothing about the “fact death” all these Agile iterations have left in their wake.

The nice helpful tech bloggers spotted the changes and filled up the internet search results with some helpful information that had the half-life of a fruit fly.

And now there is all this frustrating misinformation our there just to twist the knife when you set off to do something you always could do, and can still do, but only if you guess how the f**k those AGILE SADISTS have decided to make you do it, for the next ten minutes, because, hey, after tomorrow’s update all bets are off.

So in closing.

I don’t care what the benefits of Agile development are.

It leaves in its wake a turbulent, evil trail of fact-rot that will drive customers crazy, and very much away.

If you don’t have the basic decency to clean up that stinking pile of misinformation your wonderful development methodology is generating then you manifestly deserve every lost customer.

If the waste and frustration Plex and Google dealt out to me in the last few days is a portent of a new Agile world then Agile be killed – mercilessly and quickly.

Of course I lack the super-power to effect the death of Agile. So I remain instead hopeful that it will nonetheless die painfully, destroyed from the inside by the cancer of its own arrogance.

Though not slowly. Dear God not slowly. I can’t take much more of this.

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Notes:

(1) Google, here’s something you should think about. Yes people are drawn to food photos. It’s primal. But very, very few people sitting in front of their breakfast / lunch / midnight snack with a mobile phone camera are going to have the talent to take a photo of that food that is not grey, limp / sloppy / sludgy, wet and generally says to the viewer, “Hey, look! Here’s a big plate of glop I am about to eat.”