[BlargMcLarg]

The "Agile" problem is more like a bunch of consultants and managers polarizing the population while the middle waves their hands and goes "uh, guys, you know 'agile' isn't the same as Scrum, and many more implementations exist beyond it, right?". As the consultants and managers keep insisting that if you don't want to participate in "Agile Scrum" (how in the world did we get this abomination of a word anyway?), you "don't understand the values of Scrum and/or Agile". In turn, monopolizing the ideology of iterative, short cycle development.

The last being absolutely insane, since both the values in Scrum and the values in the Agile Manifesto are extremely broad and abstract. Even the guide itself clearly states Scrum only being an implementation for those values, not the definition of those values.

[yaml-ops-guy]

I’ve always found it ironic when coming across discussions of people’s frustration with Agile (uppercase A) only to see the “you’re doing it wrong” comment-which I’ve seen often right Here on HN, among other places.

Mainly because wasn’t one of the foundational elements of agile (lowercase A) “people and tools over processes”?

Lately Agile feels as ritualistic and process-heavy as a checklist for a rocket launch.

[tharkun__]

Actually, no it wasn't. The one you are referring to is:

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools

Also "Agile" doesn't feel ritualistic and process heavy. I'm probably now doing what you refer to as the "you're doing it wrong".

Agile itself is not ritualistic and process heavy. Specific frameworks and people are. E.g. take a SAFe consultant trying to get a paycheck from a large corporation. Of course that's gonna be ritualistic and process heavy. That's the point of SAFe and even in the name. They're trying to sell a "safe" implementation of agile practices to enterprise organizations. Safe in the sense of not actually having to change all that much. Basically keep what you have but you can call yourself agile now. Comes with a rubber stamp too now!

That's way different than a company trying to actually live agile values as defined in the manifesto. E.g. throw away your issue tracking tool to build your software and put a bunch of post it notes all over the walls at the office. Talk to your peers. Build awesome software together from rough drafts on a post it. Or how a friend of mine describes working at Tesla: "Jira issues? Yeah we write those after implementation is done so that the AC match what we did". Awesome!

[yaml-ops-guy]

QED

[tharkun__]

Hehehe, self fulfilling prophecy really. And no worries I get it. 'Problem' is, I'm still on the idealistic agile train myself and thus I will predictably (and I told you it was coming) fall into that pattern. Can't do anything about it. On the interwebs it's obviously hard to impossible to distinguish this from other forms of this. E.g. the SAFe consultant who feels dissed ;)

So yeah if you see me in real life, I'm fighting for proper agile value implementation in the organization around me and living and teaching them in my teams.