Agreed.
But feel compelled to add: Agile is only a problem when teams pretend to follow it but actually don't.
But feel compelled to add: Agile is only a problem when teams pretend to follow it but actually don't.
i prefer to think that a master craftsman is one who can take any tools and materials and use them to produce good work... if not exceptional.
If you are forced to use an inferior tool like Agile, then sure, you want to make the best of it and be a craftsman who can still succeed.
That is an endorsement of being adaptable and self-reliant as an engineer, not an endorsement of Agile.
And if a tool is bad like Agile, it's useful to point it out and slowly steer the bureaucracy that feeds it into bastardizing whatever the next tool is, but hopefully inching forward to a better global state as well.
Doing awesome things with primitive tools is a parlor trick. Grandstanding.
The craftsman blames themself for using the wrong tool for the job, not the tool.
Agile is actually hard to get to grips with. It requires lots of discipline. So did the pre-agile methods that worked best. And it gets half-done for the same reason that the pre-agile methods got half-done.
It's hard. Hard to do, hard to learn, tempting to stop.
Agile process without agile culture objectively isn't True Agile. It's worse than everything it sets out to solve with the alternatives.
Putting aside that particular nitpick, it's easy to cargo-cult the practices. I sometimes use the analogy of the introduction of lean manufacturing in the US. At first what was introduced were the tools: boards, line-stoppages etc. But tools are just tools, by themselves they're not enough.
The uncomfortable, expensive and difficult truth in our industry is that people, process and tooling are not substitutable. You need the best of all three that you can get.
Some of the points in the Agile manifesto are just arrogant, unjustified statements of fact or vague and useless comments.
Some people hate face-to-face interaction... and what the hell is a 'regular interval'... and sometimes a clear vision and direction from above achieves the very greatest of results that the team without it would have failed to produce.
Its not useless, but its not without fault either.