Agile, Scrum and Other Crap You Love is to Make Owners Rich
Modern production methodologies are designed to help owners produce more, faster, and cheaper, thus naturally increasing profits. To achieve this, methods and rituals have been created, invented, and optimized to work with more easily available, less skilled, and of course, cheaper labor.
The same situation applies to software development. Developers should not feel inadequate for not using certain methods or tools. None of these methods focus on improving working conditions, increasing happiness, or raising incomes for workers.
These methods are designed to include less skilled labor in the process, maintain production and profitability despite scattered decision-making and frequent personnel changes in each unit. Skilled labor may occasionally benefit, but this is merely an unintended side effect.
Modern production methodologies generally focus on efficiency and cost reduction goals. To achieve this, owners of production tools develop various strategies to lower costs and increase production speed. These strategies often include optimizing the workforce, using technology, and standardizing processes.
The methods and rituals used in this context may include:
Lean Production: Focuses on minimizing waste and eliminating processes that do not create value. The goal is to produce more with fewer resources.
Total Quality Management (TQM): Aims to continuously improve quality. It seeks to reduce errors in the production process and lower costs.
Just-In-Time (JIT): Ensures that materials and products are produced only as needed and in the required quantities, reducing inventory costs and speeding up the production process.
Automation and Digitalization: Uses robots, artificial intelligence, and other technologies in production processes to lower labor costs and increase production speed.
Mass Production: Reduces unit costs by producing on a large scale. This requires machines and processes capable of high-volume production.
Flexible Production Systems: Allows for the quick production of different products. This makes the production process more efficient and adaptable.
These methods are designed to work with cheaper and more easily accessible labor. In other words, while these production methods aim to use the workforce more efficiently and reduce costs, they are also continuously optimized to enable faster and greater production. Strategies to procure labor at lower costs are often applied in these processes.
AND ALSO
Similar principles apply to software development as well. In software development, efficiency, cost reduction, and fast delivery are also key goals. The methods and approaches used to achieve these goals are optimized in a similar manner. Here are some methods used to reach these goals in software development:
Agile Methodologies: Agile methods break projects into small, manageable pieces and speed up the development process with continuous feedback. Methods like Scrum and Kanban provide fast and flexible development processes.
DevOps: Enhances collaboration between development (Dev) and operations (Ops) teams to develop and deploy software more quickly and reliably. It reduces errors and speeds up the release process using automation tools and continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) processes.
Modular and Microservices Architectures: Breaking software into smaller, independent components speeds up development and makes maintenance easier. Microservices allow each component to be developed and scaled separately.
Software Templates and Libraries: Reusable code components, libraries, and templates accelerate the development process and improve code quality. This reduces the need to start from scratch on new projects.
Automated Testing: Automated tests quickly test software after every change and detect errors early. This improves software quality and speeds up the development process.
Development Tools and IDEs: Modern development tools and integrated development environments (IDEs) make coding, debugging, and testing faster and more efficient.
Remote Work and Global Workforce: Allowing developers to work from different locations expands the talent pool and reduces costs. This helps provide more cost-effective and skilled teams for software projects.
These methods are designed to make software development processes more efficient, reduce costs, and deliver projects faster. In software development, new approaches and tools are continually being developed to ensure high quality and fast delivery.