[vkuruthers]

100% this. I also find it extremely annoying to have to give daily status updates on highly complex, time consuming problem. It shows a complete lack of understanding of the work being done.

The sooner we move om from this Agile garbage the better.

[silveroriole]

Agree. Over many years I realise I actually found waterfall great as a dev. There the worst that could happen was a clueless PM poking in every week and having to be given a vague estimate of how done we were with various tasks. Sure, it probably sucked for that PM, but I was having a good time. Now? Sometimes having to meaninglessly sum up where I am with a piddly ‘agile’ task MULTIPLE times a DAY. It takes more time to update jira/managers/coworkers than to just do the damn thing. Really winds me up.

[vkuruthers]

Yes, I strongly prefer waterfall. Back in the good old days we had a biz. quarter to deliver a set of features. This allowed time for a spec., thinking about how it would all work, doing a design doc, working with QA on how they'd effectively test the features etc. Weekly status updates were adequate and an appropriate "polling frequency".

All of that is now thrown out the window in the mad hacking frenzy to make progress on the stupid "points" and try and show progress at the dreaded daily standup meeting (even though it's not supposed to be a progress meeting).

Then to make it worse, various team's progress are compared by looking at "points completed" without any kind of normalization of difficulty or risk for the different teams.

Then the final insult is the whole debacle is deemed a "success" because we've "switched to Agile", thereby checking off a box that some CTO with too much time on his hands read about in some MIT technology review.

I would actively refuse any job offering "Agile development" unless they had a very practical & pragmatic way of implementing it. The only one getting any benefits from this crap are the Agile consultants and the PMs.