[api]

I'm gonna be a dork and not read the article and just say this:

There is no magic bullet "methodology." Agile, Lean, etc. are sets of ideas and methods and some of them are very good, but they cannot be applied without thought. Think of them as management design patterns. You still have to look at these sets of design patterns and decide which ones work for your particular situation, or adapt them to your peculiar organizational needs. I've seen too many shops that apply Agile/Scrum/whatever slavishly and unthinkingly with poor (and often extremely annoying) results.

[varelse]

I don't think agle/lean/scrum is the underlying problem. These methods, like any other, have their place.

But in my painful experience, large corporations seem to:

1. Apply all the micromanagement bits they like (daily standups, sprints) and ignore the rest of the methodology. This then creates a horrible Lovecraftian mutant methodology about which others have written, but IMO sucks.

2. Insist on a one-size-fits-all approach and broadly speaking, agile is fine for incremental development of software with solid and understood requirements, but it goes off the deep-end when there's any level of open-ended research required to get a satisfactory result. Ironically, this part is inextricably intertwined with the first point wherein fixed schedules and requirements are hybridized with daily standups and 2-week sprints.

[fuzzix]

The article has little to do with software development methodologies and does not mention "Lean" or "Agile".

Probably more interesting to investors than developers.