I've been through three full-fledged "agile transformations" in my career. I hate agile so much. I hate it because it encourages dogmatic behavior instead of

I've been through three full-fledged "agile transformations" in my career. I hate agile so much. I hate it because it encourages dogmatic behavior instead of rational behavior. I think it has survived so long because it provides its practitioners with two ace excuses: when things fail, they say, "what we did wasn't really agile," and when somebody proposes and improvement they don't like, it's always, "that sounds like waterfall." A team can't recover from their agile transformation until both of those phrases disappear from the team lexicon. > “Way too much of Agile has been not about technology, but about people and about managing things and about getting stuff done — not necessarily getting the right stuff done, but getting stuff done — rather than what engineering is about,” I'm not sure agile was ever designed to fix this. The whole process is really handy-wavy about the actual engineering: "we'll just make this a spike." The process also demonizes documentation and design work, which is antithetical to most engineering. That being said, I love iterative development, and I like the concept of stories as descriptions of functionality. But I do think agile, as taught by most consultants, is really designed for consultants who build CRUD web-based applications. Sprints are timeboxed so consultants can charge by the spring, and stories lack implementation details because companies hiring consultants don't want or need to know how their sausage is made. The further away your product is from that area, the less effective agile is; some companies really need to design their sausage well, up front, because they are going to be eating it for years. A process that's built up over years has become the way it is typically for good reason. And in my experience, teams forced to transition to agile will end up shoehorning their existing process into "agile" and calling it done, so most executives don't really see how their "transformation" failed.