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Comment by eesmith | Hacker News Reader

Interesting analogy. Bottled mineral water companies have sold you the fear of drinking tap water, with a product which is orders of magnitude more expensive than tap water, and nearly always with in one-use plastic bottles to boot. (Though I reuse them to hold tap water.)

Agile companies sell the fear that You're Doing It Wrong.

What resonated most with me from the satirical piece was:

> If you ever see a software product with a copyright date before, say, 2001, it is a work of fiction, placed by The Great Cunningham to test our faith.

I've read accounts of the 1980s-ish days at MS, Apple, VisiCalc, and other software companies.

So far I have yet to read one which used waterfall.

Modern Agile proponents seem to define Agile as "not-waterfall", so I guess Wozniac's Integer BASIC in the 1970s was developed using Agile methods. /s

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[I'm the article author]

> I've read accounts of the 1980s-ish days at MS, Apple, VisiCalc, and other software companies. > So far I have yet to read one which used waterfall.

Indeed, even the Royce paper everyone cites to describe waterfall doesn't even use waterfall.

While true, I also know there's the Dark Matter of software development - most of the internal software development at large (non-software) companies never sees the light of day.

(XP's famous use in the failed Chrysler Comprehensive Compensation System is one exception. The Edsel also had some innovative features.)

Anyway, that's all to say there's a 25 year period (including popular interpretations of DOD-STD-2167A) where risk-averse managers with no software development management experience might have heard about waterfall and said "gimme some of that."

My working assumption is that that's the target audience of the expensive Agile consultants. 'Cause at least that makes some sense.

Yeah, scrum is the “nobody got fired for buying an IBM” of 21st century project management systems.

A good starting point for Scrum skepticism is that none of the Scrum jargon terms are in the Manifesto for Agile Software Development.

I don't think that's a valid inference. Quoting Wikipedia at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrum_(software_development) :

> In the early 1990s, Ken Schwaber used what would become scrum at his company, Advanced Development Methods; while Jeff Sutherland, John Scumniotales and Jeff McKenna developed a similar approach at Easel Corporation, referring to it using the single word Scrum.[16]

> Sutherland and Schwaber worked together to integrate their ideas into a single framework, scrum. They tested scrum and continually improved it, leading to their 1995 paper,[17] contributions to the Manifesto for Agile Software Development in 2001,[18] and the worldwide spread and use of scrum since 2002.

(I verified that with a Google Book snippet for that 1995 publication, which says: "More recently, a refined approach to the SCRUM process has been applied by Sutherland to Smalltalk development and Schwaber to Delphi development. The SCRUM approach is used at leading edge software companies with significant success.)

You can see both Sutherland and Schwaber are signatories to the Manifesto.

I think it's unlikely they would be signatories if the Manifesto was not aligned with principles of scrum.

The Scrum way of doing Agile is mostly fine, especially as the people who created Scrum define it. The problems with Scrum that I have seen are mostly the result of expedient training. Scrum is a victim of its own success in that way.

Scrum jargon combined with a recipe-based application of Scrum makes things worse. Some Scrum jargon is counterproductive on the face of it. "Sprints" imply working faster. "Product owner" is often a debased form of product management. There is a normal English word for everything in Scrum.

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