[bumby]

>The entire point is and always has been to get the right people working on the right stuff

This is my sticking point. The whole idea of process-focus is that you can rarely count on having "the right people working on the right stuff." Sometimes the "right person" today isn't the right person tomorrow because they're dealing with an illness or emotional event at home or something else that throws them off their game. The whole point of process control is that reality doesn't match an idealistic notion of "the right person on the right job at the right time".

[psunavy03]

The whole point of Agile is to organically grow what processes make sense in that particular context, not "process control" for its own sake. Even Scrum was designed to be deliberately incomplete so organizations can do what makes sense for them, not just blindly follow a checklist.

And it's not about someone not being "the right person" because they're human. It's about having the right skillsets on the team working on the right products, architected in such a way as to be releaseable easily enough to be responsive to what customers need.

What needs to die are managers stuffing unrelated work into one team, splitting work across teams so dependencies get ping-ponged back and forth, and then making people do 30-45 minute dailies because it's a status report, not a team sync.

What is dead is TACO Agile . . . Terms And Ceremonies Only. Although it was arguably never alive in the first place, more of a shambling zombie with about as much brains.

[bumby]

It really seems like both sides talk past each other. If you talk to agile advocate about how to implement it in something safety critical that requires good documentation, they’re quick to point out agile isn’t anti-documentation, it’s anti-wasteful-documentation. A good process focus is also always trying to reduce waste. Likewise, a process focused advocate would say the focus needs to be on what the customer requires: working software.

The issue seems to be both sides provide cover for incompetence. Agile folks can eschew tools that help identify and mitigate risks because it’s ignorance masquerading as efficiency. Process folks can focus too much on the process itself when they don’t understand how to track what’s really important.