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Comment by ownagefool | Hacker News Reader

The thing is, the core agile points from the manifesto are pretty much universally fine and can pretty much be boiled down to, "make changes fast, get feedback, gain more understanding faster".

Pretty much everything that's been layered on top though has either nothing to do with the manifesto, or actively breaks it. i.e. there's a burning issue, I'll get to that after my sprint commitment, which was sold to let me finish work, but now only exists to stress me out to squeeze more widgets per unit of time, where the widgets pretty much never actually map back to anything actually tangible.

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> Pretty much everything that's been layered on top

...and that /is/ topic of discussion every time this discussion happens

Every agile criticism conversation goes like this

A: agile as practiced is bad

B: but the manifesto is solid

It's predictable as the sun rising

And usually:

C: Therefore you’re doing it wrong.

And once an “agile guru” enters the conversation:

D: You need my book / seminar / services.

Is agile the socialism of software development methodologies?

(Not for any deeper reason, only that whenever socialism fails, people tell you that 'real socialism' hasn't been tried, yet.)

It's the same with every *-ism.

That's not actually true. To give a silly example: does anyone (seriously) claim that 'true fascism' has never been tried?

Or: liberal democracy (I'm sure you can find a synonym that ends in *-ism) has been tried. It's been doing ok-ish. Obviously it has warts and all. But more importantly: approximately no one ever seriously claims that 'real liberal democracy' hasn't been tried.

Similar for constitutional monarchy, or 'social market economy', or dictatorships, etc. People can mostly agree that the real deal has been tried.

Because it's true.

Scrum is like Spaghetti Carbonara in America. The ingredients are simple and there's a tiny bit of technique involved that anybody can figure out after a few tries. For some reason though almost everybody that makes it decides that they know better than the people that invented it and so adulterates it with peas and onions and garlic and cream and cream cheese and Italian seasoning and parsley and chives until it ends up being Olive Garden Alfredo. If they wanted Carbonara then they would have cooked the Carbonara, not the waterfall with a bunch of JIRA workflows and four-hour meetings layered on top. They just did what they would have done anyway while attempting to sound fancy via obfuscation.

"If it had ham, it would be closer to a British carbonara..."

https://www.instagram.com/reel/DK3aeJjyv98/?hl=en

Any principle or practice falls apart when tied to an economy. See also: religion, politics, society at large. I don't foresee that changing in our lifetimes, so make money doing it the wrong way, and do it the right way in your free time.

It's not just Agile but the same applies to DevOps.

DevOps is a culture. It can also be the specific subset of highly skilled individuals who were part of or an outcome of said cultures cross pollination. Today DevOps most often means fairly unskilled person hitting pipelines with hammer.

In the end, the same old people with the same old commercial interests adopted the term in a way that benefited them but changed the meaning of the term because change was not actually something anyone wanted.

I don’t agree with that though, plenty of places practice agile well. Maybe big corporations don’t practice it well, but startups often do agile correctly and understand the philosophy.

Nobody gives a fuck about the Agile Manifesto.

Inasmuch as Agile was adopted at companies, it's because it was sold to them as a way to provide greater transparency, accountability, and control into a chaotic software development process. The vice president behind the company's "Agile Transformation" probably can't even name point one of the manifesto; "we're doing Scrum with JIRA, therefore we're agile" is the extent of his concern.

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