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by mongol 1183 days ago
I think it is crazy we are debating Agile more than 20 years after it was coined. After such long time, a successful idea should not need constant debate about its advantages and disadvantages. We should be on the next thing now, post-Agile, whatever that would be.
3 comments

I think you have that exactly backwards. ONLY successful ideas are being debated more than 20 years after they are proposed. Only successful ideas spawn reaction and counter-reaction, which lead to its evolution - which you say is not happening, but certainly is, as evidenced by the tree of methodologies that branched from it.

In that respect (which might not be the one the coiners hoped for), capital A agile has been extremely successful.

If it was successful, it would be so normal that there would be no argument about it. It would be taken for granted as the platform which other improvements are built on. It would be like water to fish. That is not what I see.
Because its not very intuitive until you start doing it (at least some parts). I mean having meeting for 10 mins every day vs 1x weekly hourly one works for every project I've ever seen. Shorter sprints work generally better too, tighter interaction with stakeholders is simply reasonable.

That's mostly what I've seen adopted, not much more. Its a bit painful if you ever need to go back, but entirely possible. Some people actually perform quite well with old ways.

Those 10 minute meetings are 5 hours of lost time for deep work each week. Daily status reports are excessive. "Sprints" in general don't work in my experience, they are unnecessary overhead. You want to work in something more towards half-year projects, not two week "sprints".
Note that’s a specific flavor of Agile related to Scrum, not the only flavor.

Personally I do 2 stand-ups a week, and a monthly sprint board (Kanban like?) with no sprint planning or any other process/system meetings. Any other meeting is as-hoc on demand. Working well!

IMO one thing that makes it still interesting to discuss is that it has become something of a poster child of cargo cult. That phenomenon persists, whether it's Agile or something else.