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Comment by draw_down | Hacker News Reader

I see the point, but it’s funny that the author lays out the reason why this goalpost-moving is happening.

As pointed out, you sound like an idiot if you’re against Agile. So it’s a lot easier to get what you want if you just call it Agile.

I get that it’s not intellectually rigorous or whatever, but good grief, when has that ever mattered in business. Is there any class of concepts that survives unblemished after contact with reality?

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Agile is bogus nonsense - there I said it.

Cool... what's your alternative?

Software used to be built before Agile...

Let's at least keep solution design and also get senior engineers to help estimate

And do away with daily stand up and bs rituals.. a meeting is needed when it is needed, not for the sake of "following the process"

Yeah, iterate quickly, learn from your customers usage, repeat.

You're right, total rubbish. /s

Your pithy dismissal leaves out hundreds of pages of religious rites and project management dances which invariably turn into productivity-sucking meeting overload, unachievable goals, and constant product churn, effectively alienating everyone from the developer to the user, leaving only the managers satisfied. Like telling a college student that communism doesn't work, any objection is met with "well they're just not doing REAL Agile," skipping over the fact that nobody on Earth seems to be "doing REAL Agile."

Agile could just as well serve in the headline in place of DevOps.

This is not how it works in real life. Contracts are made to the lowest bidder, there are promises to keep or heads will roll. By iteration 10, your customer is fuming that the half baked idea has more exceptions than handled scenarios and the finger pointing begins. Also, forget about architecture, performance, security and other pesky little problems. I have never seen it play out differently.

The biggest problem is that the person footing the bill does not care about your story points or retrospective- and I don't blame them for that

I'm not sure I agree with the author wrt Agile. I've never been on a team that did anything that resembled agile but I have been on teams that actively pushed back when anything that looked like it sort of resembled agile got floated. I'm not saying its 100% bad but I'm not sure it has a universally good reputation

> Is there any class of concepts that survives unblemished after contact with reality?

We're not talking about reality, though. We're talking about things consultants market to management.

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