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Comment by ebiester | Hacker News Reader

Fine. Let's assume that Agile is worse than the alternative. I am willing to accept that. However, which process are you arguing for, in its stead? "Programming, Motherfucker?" Shapeup? (Shapeup gets pretty close to agile in spirit.) Spiral Model? (I am assuming you're not arguing for RUP or others.)

Conceptually, I like shapeup. I think spiral model is fine - I'd argue that a lot of "agile" shops are closer to spiral.

Now, there are tools in agile that I'll vehemently defend, such as continuous integration and retrospectives. I'm a fan of most of the principles, such as "Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design enhances agility." But we are now at a point that if we're going to argue that "agile doesn't work," we've had enough time as an industry to gather around an alternative.

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The alternative is to just do what makes sense, without calling it anything. Junk shit like what scrum has become, for example not discussing technical stuff during standup (why the fuck not? that's what our job is about), artificially splitting stories into 2 week boxes (why the fuck should I break down something that isn't naturally breakable?), why create a card for every thing I'm working on (fucking control freak heaven), etc. It's completely juvenile, gaslighting, cargo cult scientology.

Continuous integration => of course, for me, never worked at a place where it didn't happen and that was before agile was even a thing. If I hopped on a project where it didn't make sense though, I should be free to ditch it.

There is no one way to write software that works for every project and there is no one process that works for every project. Just let the experienced folks decide what to use instead of leaning on some bullshit fixed crap process.

> The alternative is to just do what makes sense, without calling it anything.

You argue in favor of not calling things things, and then go on to call a lot of things things. You demonstrate why we need to name things: to talk about them more effectively.

What makes sense to one person may not make sense to another. I agree that each team should decide based what's right for them based on the people and the problems. But to do that beyond the trivial, we need to name things.

Sure you can name things, but there is no agreed upon definition of what scrum or agile means, so don't talk about them. They are useless, unscientific terms.

Does it need to have a fancy name and can’t be some frankenstein process you set as you look at the team and address the part where they needs structure ?

> However, which process are you arguing for, in its stead?

You don't need to do any other process. You can just talk to people as problems arise and do that "in stead".

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