[Arnt]

This sits uneasily with me. I cannot remember any time when a Methodology was followed in practice. Just my bad luck?

The relogious people (mentioned in the article) harmed by false adherence. They adhered to the headlines and warped the substance of what the Methodology said. I remember (with pain) a place that wouldn't develop development scaffolding. They had rules for software development, good ones, motivated by achieving near-perfect uptime for customer-facing services. Implementing a scaffolding service or crontab to that standard was a lot of work.

Then there's the non-adherents who eroded the Methodology. Like the scrum shops that eroded scrum by deemphasising the product owner and stories until the result looked more like a waterfall.

The Methodologies may be broken as a whole but the practice I've seen was generally so distorting that I feel it's unfair to blame the Methodologies.

[TulliusCicero]

If a methodology cannot be followed effectively by (presumably intelligent and sincere) individuals, why blame the people?

This reminds me of the people on the far right or left who believe, "[Capitalism/Communism] can't fail; it can only be failed."

[Arnt]

This would be an excellent point if there existed a methodology that people do manage to follow.

Some of the failure I've seen can be partly explained by people who wanted to have their cake and eat it. Who wanted, say, the promised advantages of Scrum but were not willing to pay its costs (lack of long-term plans and fixed finish dates).

That's not all. It's part of the explanation for some of the suckage I've experienced.

I do blame people for not making up their minds. The people who invented scrum were willing to give up some parts of long-term planning, and got remarkable results for that. They are not to blame when others later failed by not giving up blah.

Maybe some blame should go to conslutants who oversold the benefits of Methodologies without stressing the costs. "YES YOU ACTUALLY HAVE TO DO THIS, IT WILL WORK BADLY OTHERWISE".

[taeric]

I take the other view. I actively blame some of the people that "invented" these methodologies.

Being introspective of your capabilities and your achievements is an extremely valuable skill that I wish more of us had. However, selling your capabilities and giving vague promises that it will help with development if you only followed these practices is a deceitful way to make some money off of your reputation.

Worse, many of them do this by attacking those that came before them, but then taking the stance that their "teachings" are above attack. And that anybody that isn't getting the same benefits they did just aren't applying themselves correctly.

[coredog64]

Can we please call this the "No true Scrum Master" fallacy?

[borplk]

Perfect. I know I will. Thank you.

[PeachPlum]

In Lean Six Sigma mistakes are treated as mistakes of process not mistakes of participants.

[analog31]

Maybe this is an embodiment of the rule that "all complex systems operate in failure mode most of the time." The fact of failure mode doesn't necessarily justify abandoning a system, because the system that replaces it will also run in failure mode.

Note: I understand "failure mode" to mean that rules are being ignored, or guards have been disabled.

[cirgue]

Methodologies are like any other pattern of human social behavior: if they're not structured in such a way that individual actors have a reason to buy into them, then they don't work, no matter how great it could be if everyone just bought in all the way. Literally everything else in human civilization is like that, why should software development methodologies be any different?