[onion2k]

Agreed. when I started in the 90s I often got several months of focused work without many interruptions.

I did that too. Quite often the project failed after those months because we'd built the wrong thing, or the landscape had changed, or the customer had failed to spec what they needed well enough. This was the "Waterfall" methodology, and Agile, with all its meetings, is specifically designed to fix that problem.

[csande17]

My favorite Agile failure case is when you have all the meetings and still fail, because you spent all your time on Agile paperwork instead of designing and building a product.

[Trasmatta]

Exactly. Teams that drink the Agile Kool-Aid seem to fail and build the wrong things just as often.

Besides, why can't we be lower case agile, and avoid all these meetings anyway? I write very detailed PRs with high level summaries, screenshots and videos, explanation of risks and trade offs, and deeper technical dives. Everything you need to know about what I'm working on is literally right there. I push up code early and often, it's not like I just want to sit in an isolated cave for 6 months and then emerge with a finished product.

[uuyi]

I am currently succeeding at this failure.

[spaetzleesser]

You just didn’t do enough stand ups /s

[spaetzleesser]

They failed because you were overmanaged and leadership didn’t trust people to do the right thing. We were very agile back then, iterated quickly towards the goal but we didn’t do rituals, stand ups and other ceremonies. We just talked to each other and stakeholders.

[theknocker]

Yeah and it doesn't. In practice, it just enables managers to become even more useless by blaming devs for their poor project management.

[onion2k]

Agile projects can still fail obviously, but when they do they tend to fail in smaller ways (eg 4 weeks late instead of 6 months late, or almost hit the requirements instead of completely missed). That's a massive win.

[Trasmatta]

And in the process, you burn out your devs, and have constant churn. How late are things happening in the long term, because teams prioritize the Agile rituals over cultivating long term technical excellence, craftsmanship, and team satisfaction? The way many teams practice Agile has a huge opportunity cost that's very difficult to measure, but still real.