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If you consider that the entire point of Agile™ is evidently to reduce programmer efficiency by 40-60% over the "actually give them a few days in a row of unint

If you consider that the entire point of Agile™ is evidently to reduce programmer efficiency by 40-60% over the "actually give them a few days in a row of uninterrupted time to work" technique, this makes sense. By letting 7 simultaneous cooks in the kitchen not for meal planning, but for actually cooking the same dish, the near optimum 3% of employee value can realized.

wpietri 11y ago
I agree, but I'd like to separate here Agile from Agile™. I was at a number of the early Agile conferences, and the biggest critique at the time, a valid one, was it was mainly a revolt of programmers saying, "Enough of this management bullshit, let's create a method where work actually gets done." That's why one of the points in the agile manifesto [1] is about valuing working software. It was an amazing group of people. But what has become Agile™ is, in my view, the same managerial power structures co-opting the vocabulary and the energy for change into something so watered down that it has a lot of the same problems. [2] This works for many organizations because their actual priorities are less about getting things done or delivering customer value, and more about maintaining primate status hierarchies and letting people play out their office dramas. So for those people who are at the rare organizations that would like to get something done, I encourage them to dig past the pile of Agile™ horseshit to find the perfectly serviceable horses. [1] http://agilemanifesto.org/ http://agilemanifesto.org/ [2] I've written more about this here: http://agilefocus.com/2011/02/21/agiles-second-chasm-and-how-we-fell-in/ http://agilefocus.com/2011/02/21/agiles-second-chasm-and-how...
- nickbauman 11y ago
  I agree. The local chapter of the Project Management Institute has 7,000 members. I don't think there are 7,000 people here in town who can actually write code, so this is where Agile becomes Agile™. They map agile buzzwords into their own screwed up processes designed mostly to appear important and CYA. It's almost the definition of an anathema.
JustSomeNobody 11y ago
What I love is when agile is followed so rigidly that it simply isn't agile at all.
overgard 11y ago
I like your definition, although I've always thought of agile as an effective way of turning difficult to measure productivity into an easy to measure lack of productivity. You might not be getting anything more done, but those burndown charts look good!

wpietri 11y ago

I agree, but I'd like to separate here Agile from Agile™. I was at a number of the early Agile conferences, and the biggest critique at the time, a valid one, was it was mainly a revolt of programmers saying, "Enough of this management bullshit, let's create a method where work actually gets done." That's why one of the points in the agile manifesto [1] is about valuing working software. It was an amazing group of people. But what has become Agile™ is, in my view, the same managerial power structures co-opting the vocabulary and the energy for change into something so watered down that it has a lot of the same problems. [2] This works for many organizations because their actual priorities are less about getting things done or delivering customer value, and more about maintaining primate status hierarchies and letting people play out their office dramas. So for those people who are at the rare organizations that would like to get something done, I encourage them to dig past the pile of Agile™ horseshit to find the perfectly serviceable horses. [1] http://agilemanifesto.org/ http://agilemanifesto.org/ [2] I've written more about this here: http://agilefocus.com/2011/02/21/agiles-second-chasm-and-how-we-fell-in/ http://agilefocus.com/2011/02/21/agiles-second-chasm-and-how...

nickbauman 11y ago
I agree. The local chapter of the Project Management Institute has 7,000 members. I don't think there are 7,000 people here in town who can actually write code, so this is where Agile becomes Agile™. They map agile buzzwords into their own screwed up processes designed mostly to appear important and CYA. It's almost the definition of an anathema.

JustSomeNobody 11y ago

What I love is when agile is followed so rigidly that it simply isn't agile at all.

overgard 11y ago

I like your definition, although I've always thought of agile as an effective way of turning difficult to measure productivity into an easy to measure lack of productivity. You might not be getting anything more done, but those burndown charts look good!