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Comment by ravenstine | Hacker News Reader

Agile, and especially SCUM, are a scam. Well intentioned, yes, but mostly serve to create an industry around a problem that often doesn't exist at all.

That's not even my main objection to Agile.

The worst part of these methodologies is that there's no evidence that they work. It doesn't matter whether an individual team thinks it works. Does it work for many teams? What about most teams? What for what kinds of teams does it work best? What kinds of teams does it have no impact on or a negative impact for? Nobody actually knows, and seemingly nobody is interested in studying it. Even companies themselves aren't honest about whether Agile is working for them. Burndown charts and the overall number of tickets being closed is about as far as it gets, except management inevitably gets their hands on these things and uses them as a means to extract more work from their employees. What suffers? Quality. Agile doesn't care about quality.

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> The worst part of these methodologies is that there's no evidence that they work.

What methodology do you find in Agile? It doesn't really say much. In fact, here is the Agile Manifesto in full:

* Individuals and interactions over processes and tools

* Working software over comprehensive documentation

* Customer collaboration over contract negotiation

* Responding to change over following a plan

That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more.

If anything, Agile promotes not getting hung up on methodology, to just use some common sense.

I am a big fan of the Agile Manifesto, but Agile has evolved to be something completely different.

It became a rigid process where people debate the definition of story points rather than getting shit done.

tbh, Agile as preached and Agile as practiced is not exactly similar.

I think there is even a good video describing that, from 7 years ago[0].

agile does not at all mean backlogs, or sprints, or specific tooling or even CI. Agile boils down in essence to “deliver often, do the minimum needed, prioritise prototyping”.

[0]: https://youtu.be/a-BOSpxYJ9M

Seems like Scrum is Anti-Agile.

Obligatory https://www.halfarsedagilemanifesto.org

Worth quoting that link in full:

"Manifesto for Half-Arsed Agile Software Development

We have heard about new ways of developing software by paying consultants and reading Gartner reports. Through this we have been told to value:

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools and we have mandatory processes and tools to control how those individuals (we prefer the term ‘resources’) interact

Working software over comprehensive documentation as long as that software is comprehensively documented

Customer collaboration over contract negotiation within the boundaries of strict contracts, of course, and subject to rigorous change control

Responding to change over following a plan provided a detailed plan is in place to respond to the change, and it is followed precisely

That is, while the items on the left sound nice in theory, we’re an enterprise company, and there’s no way we’re letting go of the items on the right."

Nah, most of Scrum is fine [0], even insightful I'd say, but yeah, the certification industry that drives its adoption is a scam.

The problem is that nowadays people have to be in the software field whether they want to be in it or not. So you have the perfect storm of people who believe in good old fashioned taylorism ("scientific" management) clashing with people who ultimately reject much of that thinking. Basically, traditional management realized that it will be obsolete and power is shifting to a bunch of "nerds". So what basically happened is that they appropriated a lot of the nerds' concepts and methodologies in order to regain power.

[0] Check this out, http://scrumbook.org/ - Take your time to look at the interlinked patterns and the rationale behind them, there is some worthwhile stuff in there.

> The worst part of these methodologies is that there's no evidence that they work.

I think it's worse than that. The management that promotes these bastardized "Agile" methodologies are often hostile to any empirical data that raises questions. It's not for a lack of evidence, it's that the methodology is elevated to untouchable status and any evidence to the contrary is explicitly suppressed and ignored.

Take the example of "story points". If all planning is based on story points, and all sprints are based on executing those stories, surely each sprint retrospective would look at how well the original points aligned with objective reality - use the empirical data and compare it to the estimated story points in order to refine the theory. This is the basic scientific method! Yet I've found that teams systematically avoid any such analysis. In the worst cases, I've seen teams explicitly forbidden from discussion story points in the retrospective ("How dare you attack the methodology with empirical data!").

And here again, someone who didn't bother to read/underestand the article and instead doing exactly the cargo culting.

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