Agile Has Failed. Officially
medium.com
medium.com
I'm willing to believe that a particular implementation of the Agile manifesto has failed, but agile is really just a set of common sense tenants which do not enforce a particular way of doing things. The alternatives are stultified bureaucracy or chaos... and Agile will always be able to run circles around that.
I agree. Agile seems to be widely successful, both in practical terms (it's widespread and the dominant methodology in the industry) and in formal terms (it's specified as requirements in institutional organizations in place of waterfall).
Claiming that Agile failed has vibes of Yogi Berra's "nobody goes there anymore, it's too crowded."
I see this over and over again with agile, scrum, basically any framework. If there is ever a failure of the system, it’s never agile or scrum’s fault. You’re just doing it wrong. But also apparently there is no right way to do it either, so if you can’t figure it out that sucks and is also your fault.
I think my main criticisms are 1) that any specific component from agile is consistent in the success of teams who do it and 2) that it’s reproducible across teams. You may be doing something that works well. You may call it agile. It may work. But it’s like saying I’ve had so much success driving because I use Michelin tires. Sure, it’s a core component of the system, but I if I hold all other context the same and use something else, I’m more than likely going to be successful despite it.
If you have a high performing team, it doesn’t matter if you use agile or not. You’re going to find success. If your team is not high performing, it also doesn’t matter, you’re going to be worse off than a high performing one, regardless if you use agile.
https://medium.com/developer-rants/agile-has-failed-official...
Does that mean anything at all? It reads like "don't do things poorly, do them right".
It's just a fact that I believe needs to be accepted. Just like the fact that "writing good code" is not something you learn only by reading a book or passing a certification, but rather something you acquire with practice.
That's your personal assertion, and one that contrasts with the very nature of Agile.
For instance, Agile is a set of principles devised to be applied arbitrarily by teams and adapted to their needs, which clearly tells you that "common sense" is the very basis of Agile.
Claiming that a set of principles devised to be applied based on common sense are "mostly cargo cult" and arguing "common sense" is somehow an alternative mess you are already commenting on something you are entirely oblivious about, and trying to denigrate something you don't even understand.
So what point do you think you're making, other than being needlessly contrarian?
Of course it is :-). I never pretended it was an objective fact!
> and one that contrasts with the very nature of Agile
Wait, we were talking about "the Agile framework", not "the very nature of Agile".
> So what point do you think you're making, other than being needlessly contrarian?
The point I am trying to make is that the implementation of Agile is usually cargo cult. Companies say in the job offers that they "are agile". Managers have stand ups every day where nobody listens to anything the others have to say, but don't even question the practice. Estimating "stories" for years without apparently seeing that they never had estimates that were better than truly random guesses, instead of thinking that "maybe estimations don't work in our case, why?".
I am not saying that nobody has common sense anywhere, or that the agile framework never works. Just that I have seen Agile methodologies being applied for long enough, and the vast majority of the time, those who applied them were cargo culting big time.
> trying to denigrate something you don't even understand.
Are you implying that because I don't like the Agile religion, I must not understand it?