[nscalf]

So while I totally agree with this, I have some questions:

First off, do you think Agile is better than Waterfall? I personally think that it delivers a product faster, but I'm not sure if it actually has a macro improvement on the job process. I think waterfall probably addresses your developer-centric issue of satisfaction better than Agile does. I think we may have thrown away too much with the anti-waterfall hatred our field has adopted.

Second, what alternative do you propose? I think Agile is a problem, and ultimately a pretty bad process for organizing. The overhead is so expensive. The most effective and efficient my team has ever been was when we just quit Agile and wrote what we had going on up on the white board. And you know what? I've seen this work better than Agile in a wide range of settings. "Self organizing" really seems to be the key, but regardless of the self-proclamations that Agile is self organizing, it really seems to shoot itself in the foot with extra mandatory process.

Finally, it seems like all of the good solutions don't scale. Do you think this is a problem of trying to scale problem solving? I don't think I accept the argument that this is just the cost of working at larger scale, but I haven't thought of a good way to keep a team organized and still get work done without an extreme amount of organization and process (Agile) or a really involved team lead/product owner---who will slow everyone down by needing a lot of touch points.

[externalreality]

The first problem with agile is that false dichotomy - "It's either agile or waterfall". Sorry but that dichotomy doesn't exist. Waterfall vs Agile is just a good-bad binary. Surely you want to iterate quickly and stay in constant contact with customers, if that is all agile is then I am all in. However, I can't subscribe to robbing developers of ownership of a domain. I would even do microservice arch if it meant dividing things up into domains and assigning developers microservices that they own. I want to keep developers and giving them responsibility and ownership is a good way to do it.

Its funny because, in Agile you hear "You don't want one developer leaving with all the knowledge" now instead we have all the developers leaving with all the knowledge.

[jay_kyburz]

Nothing in the Agile Manifesto says anything about robbing developers of ownership of a domain. The first line of the manifesto is "Individuals and interactions over processes and tools", which suggested to me that individual work satisfaction is right there at the top.

Whoever is running your team is doing it wrong.

[externalreality]

I wouldn't hang on every word of the agile manifesto. For example you don't have to google too much before you find people having debates over unit testing vs acceptance testing in the name of being "Agile" not giving to much attention to the "over processes and tools" part of the manifesto.

[jay_kyburz]

If we are going to critique Agile I think we should first agree what Agile is. Agile is the manifesto, not what some random dudes on the internet say it is.

[externalreality]

Agile is not the manifesto, I has really never been. Agile does not have a real definition.

[forgottenpass]

>First off, do you think Agile is better than Waterfall?

Agile does not mean "not-waterfall." Using the not-waterfall definition when convenient to the conversation is the reason "Agile" is a plague on our line of work.