[chasingsparks]

I enjoy when Zed is appropriately flippant (irony intended). While, I don't have experience working for any teams that consider "XP, Scrum, Kanban, Waterfall," etc, to be gospel, I can see that being more than "fucking" annoying.

That being said, I can see some people who haven't tried these methodologies as immediately devaluing them. Don't do that. As long as you don't view the methodologies as a silver bullet they can teach you a thing or two. Critically playing with something helps you think about why it works and where it doesn't.

(I'm not saying Zed is saying that they are not worth learning; in fact, I don't want to put any words in his mouth, especially because he's here and will probably weigh in, even though he's known for being so reserved and unopinionated.)

[zedshaw]

In all seriousness, all of the methodologies out there start out being used by some group of programmers. At this phase they're fairly successful since it's mostly programmers writing code and very little management overhead from non-programmers.

Eventually though, all of the advocates of these methodologies realize that it's management that buys what they're selling. Management buys the books, hires the consultants, pays the billable hours, and mostly in some desperate attempt to figure out what's going on despite their lack of knowledge.

In the end, all of these methodologies end up being more about management babysitting and less about actually writing the code necessary to get product out the door. In fact, I think even something like this, even though it's a joke, would end up with the same fate if it were taken seriously.

[jarin]

I had something along those lines happen at a company I worked at a few years ago, where the CEO was a notorious micro-manager. In desperation, I ordered him a copy of 37signals' Getting Real.

He apparently read it over the weekend, because the following Monday he announced at the managers' meeting that he was enlightened about project management now. Of course, he just latched on to one idea out of the whole book: that the ideal project team size was 3 people.

So what did he do? He drew up a list of 20 or so ongoing company projects on the whiteboard and assigned 3 managers to each project. Since there were around 12 managers, that meant that we ended up co-managing around 5 projects each.

[chasingsparks]

Agreed. Furthermore, I would say that's true of most things requiring a lot of experience

The people who come up with the methodologies initially are probably the people who have needed them the most / longest. They had experience that informed the development of the methodologies not methodologies that substituted for experience. Therefore, these methodologies are more successful given people who could figure out a similar methodology independently and could conceivably be worse than nothing for people who couldn't.