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Comment by academe | Hacker News Reader

It hurts my soul to read of "Agile" as a fixed process consisting of arbitrary decisions like two-week sprints and 9:30 stand-ups.

Agile is "responding to change over following a plan". https://agilemanifesto.org

There's surely something to be said for bundling behaviors and triggers, but I do wish the world of software development hadn't missed the whole damn point of agile.

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I think there's a lot to be said about why this didn't work out like that, using the cognitive load metaphor from the article. People like habits. If you're doing things differently every week you have to justify that among the team, and possibly outside it as well. Whereas (see checklist manifesto), if you turn "Agile" into a series of checkboxes that goes away. Standup? Tick. Done. Discussion of why we're having the standup? God no that's even more tedious.

Good point, and I do agree with it. I suppose I was specifically talking about the processes that a team uses - I guess"Agile" just rolls off the tongue easier.

Still reading but I like how Cat Hicks in Psychology of Software Teams (2027) confronts this dilemma on page 9: "Agile Manifesto said, 'Individuals and interactions over processes and tools.' DevOps made the argument that cohesive processes in software development needed to be invested in... Agile, DevOps, Platform Engineering, or DevEx, every engineering organization I've ever met with is struggling with implementing these ideals in the real world."

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