[kabdib]

Yeah. My old group at Microsoft started doing "agile" and it just turned into a micromanagement field day, with PMs and middle management in meetings examining charts and calling people on the carpet for missing their estimates.

Look, they're estimates . . . often made by other people than the ones doing the work.

(Oh, and having the build break for two or three weeks running didn't help the "estimates" very much. A culture of build breaking just rewards the people who are less careful than others).

I finally got the PM on our project to call our scrum meetings "status meetings" instead, because that's exactly what they were. Status for rollup into the Great Burndown Chart.

Over two years out of that garbage and I'm still bitter.

When you hear the words "Yup, we do Agile, but we have our own take on it," run away, because it's going to suck hard.

[dragonwriter]

> When you hear the words "Yup, we do Agile, but we have our own take on it," run away, because it's going to suck hard.

Agile means doing it your own way. It means customizing what works for the team and the particular tasks.

Scrum is a fixed methodology with a rulebook.

(A lot of time "Agile" gets used to mean "Scrum" but the two aren't the same, or even the same kind of thing, though the Scrum Book is an often not-unreasonable starting point for an agile organization.)

[alphard]

> When you hear the words "Yup, we do Agile, but we have our own take on it," run away, because it's going to suck hard.

Every team/company has their own take on Agile, copying what other successful teams do verbatim doesn't necessarily work. There are objectively many wrong ways to do Agile (your above example being one) but not any single "correct" way.