In theory I’d agree, but in practice agile is _always_ just a source of metrics so that middle managers can create Dutch Books out of project outcomes. I read

In theory I’d agree, but in practice agile is _always_ just a source of metrics so that middle managers can create Dutch Books out of project outcomes. I read a good way of putting it once, “when everyone misuses a tool, beyond a certain point, it’s the tool’s fault.” I think this fits the realities of agile well. Separately a lot of people will look at this or that pathological issue in agile and say that’s not “real” agile, ignoring that this is just a No True Scotsman fallacy by which you’d vacuously define agile as “all good things” or something. The main pathology I’ve seen in agile (across half a dozen companies, large & small, with or without formal agile training, etc.) is that it is paradoxically highly inflexible. If certain research tasks need to be a 4-week deep dive that cannot be chopped up into separate tickets on a sprint cadence and cannot be time-boxed, there’s no way to handle it (this happens all the time on research teams). If one team needs to work on a 3-week cycle all summer instead of the company-wide 2-week cycle, it can’t be done. If there is no way to estimate some points for a certain task, you still are forced to go through the motions and fabricate misleading numbers anyway. Even the core agile manifesto has to be ignored sometimes. Sometimes sticking to the plan actually is more important than responding to change, and you have to turn down business or tell customers no even if it costs you. Agile can be used well. It’s just exceedingly rare that it is, to such a degree that we need to admit something’s wrong with agile itself given how easy it is to subvert agile into a bad system. At this point a lot of people reply by saying, well what alternative is there? I don’t like this because it presumes there has to exist some named alternative that doesn’t suffer agile’s limitations, but no such official method has to exist and that doesn’t mean agile should be used. Instead, just use some mixture of common sense and planning based on the specific personnel working on the project, their preferences and styles, and randomly stealing things from agile or waterfall or whatever else on an as-needed bases. Don’t give it a name.