| Every time I see an "agile sucks" post, I take the time to read it and every time (so far) I have found they blame the process for some key part of agile they missed. Quote from the article: “Way too much of Agile has been not about technology, but about people and about managing things and about getting stuff done — not necessarily getting the right stuff done.” This is the whole point of agile: progress on iterations, inspect and adapt at the end of each iteration. Your team might build the "wrong stuff" for an iteration, realize it (inspect), then make a course correction (adapt). If you end up delivering the "wrong stuff" is because you didn't follow this very core principle of agile. I find it hard to believe these so called "Agile Early Evangelists" can make such a statement. Their background in lean development should have made the familiar with empirical process controls, from where lean and agile come from. My guess the author quoted them selectively to fit the "agile sucks" narrative of the article. Edit: expanded last 2 paragraphs. |
I have been privileged to work in a company that really thought about and worked to prioritize the four values on the left. I would follow those agile coaches to any place they wanted. I have been a staunch defender in real life and online, because I've seen it work very well. I also have been on teams with other processes and seen how much worse it can be.
I will take the values of agile and push for those, and I'll take the lessons learned such as quick feedback loops, continuous integration, relative estimation, automated tests (which came from people like Kent Beck and Robert Martin pushing them so hard alongside agile), and the good stuff.
However, after seeing how badly it can be weaponized against developers, I'm certainly ready to throw out the bathwater, and I think this is what they're talking about. I've seen far too much cargo cult agile and far too much command and control with a light layer of SCRUM.
We have agile "coaches" who have never learned to code! They take a set of color-by-number technical practices but don't understand how or why they matter! I had to correct someone's slide that got the four values wrong, and their consulting group apparently had been copying and pasting them incorrectly from presentation to presentation!
The values and principles of agile are great. The current implementation has some serious debt.
(And while we're at it, we could update it. Too many people misunderstood the documentation part. Continuous attention to technical excellence needs to be upgraded to a value. Delivering frequently today means days instead of weeks.)