[ngngngng]

Interesting that all these issues are completely different from my own experiences with Agile BS. We would have 10 hours of exhausting meetings every 2 weeks in order to plan our sprints. Unconsciously, we just ended up hyper inflating estimates so our team would joke about how the only thing we did each sprint was "slap a box on it" (in CSS, or some similarly simple task).

I left that job when all the developers completed their tasks a few hours before the end of the sprint, giving me (QA) just a few hours to test, merge, and deploy their code, which because of our terribly clunky and manual deploy system, just wasn't possible. I was placed under an internal investigation for not being productive because I held up the sprint of the "most productive team in the company" and made us look bad to out of state executives.

[icedchai]

I worked at a failing startup that had embraced agile BS. 4 week sprints, 2-3 days spent on retro and planning meetings. They eventually moved to 2 week sprints, but 2 days of that still went to planning. Each day had a 45 minute standup (with about 20 people from the whole "back end" team.) Each week, there was a department wide standup with over 100 people, from all of engineering! It was insane.

They used an enterprise-grade source control system run by the IT department (Perforce.) It was almost impossible to create a branch. In fact, I saw only one created during my brief 1 year time there.

Since there were no branches, you had "shelve" your changes and get an "in person" code review to merge. If you added something minor, like a new getter, but didn't have a unit test for it, you'd get flagged (even if it was used else where in the code.) It basically took forever to get anything done.

Oh yeah, they never shipped any of this stuff, either.

I could go on...

[vbtemp]

This is because words lose all meaning with "Agile".

Functional teams and companies will make good products and set up their staff for success, with or without agile.

Dysfunctional teams will have all sorts of perverse incentives and set each other up for failure, with or without agile.

[dionian]

testing should have been part of the estimates and you should have thrown that right back at the rest of the team during retro

[ngngngng]

Exactly. But my team didn't think it was a problem, we just forgave ourselves and moved on and I finished testing and deploying early in the next sprint. The problem came when external executives noticed how little we completed compared to our usual throughput and insisted that I be punished for it since I was the bottleneck. My team was just as confused as I was, but I had been meaning to move from QA/Test automation to being a developer for some time, so that just hurried me along and I left within a couple weeks.