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> Hang on, don't blame the agile manifesto here. I totally can, and will. It's on them if they popularized slogans that can be too-easily misunderstood. That

> Hang on, don't blame the agile manifesto here. I totally can, and will. It's on them if they popularized slogans that can be too-easily misunderstood. That's meant that agile, in several respects, has been an exercise of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. > Blame the management that adopted the agile manifesto as "do all the exact same things we used to do that didn't work, but call it 'agile'". That's clearly not what my employer did.

headmelted 5y ago
So very much this. We’re now at a point where the widespread and rampant destruction that’s been wrought in the name of agile is so bad that it’s not reasonable to say “oh you’re not doing it properly”. That excuse could be used to avoid responsibility for literally anything. Hype bros use that to defend token scams (“you just don’t get it”). There’s an increasing mountain of evidence that shows agile just doesn’t work, makes things actively worse by forcing the creation and then concealment by neglect of engineering problems, and (as discussed above) actively reduces documentation so that agile cheerleaders can pin their incompetence on the engineers that inherit their mess when they cruise on up the ladder oblivious of their failures. All of this and not a shred of empirical evidence, ever, that it actually achieves anything other than obscuring management stupidity.
- wheelinsupial 5y ago
  > There’s an increasing mountain of evidence that shows agile just doesn’t work Do you have any keywords I can search for to find this evidence? I haven’t looked at in in ~4 years, but the Project Management Institute (PMI) used to publish some reports based on surveys that said ~70% of corporate projects fail. I am interested in comparing the evidence you’ve seen with the evidence the PMI has put together. Edit: I think the language is “70% of projects fail to realize the planned benefits” I haven’t looked at it in years, so I could be way off. I believe that projects that are completed 2 weeks late are classified as failures the same way a project that is abandoned half way through is.
travisjungroth 5y ago
Good ol’ intent vs impact. If you’re proselytizing something, it shouldn’t be judged by your intentions or how true it is, but the impact it has on the world. Agile was not great in that regard.

headmelted 5y ago

So very much this. We’re now at a point where the widespread and rampant destruction that’s been wrought in the name of agile is so bad that it’s not reasonable to say “oh you’re not doing it properly”. That excuse could be used to avoid responsibility for literally anything. Hype bros use that to defend token scams (“you just don’t get it”). There’s an increasing mountain of evidence that shows agile just doesn’t work, makes things actively worse by forcing the creation and then concealment by neglect of engineering problems, and (as discussed above) actively reduces documentation so that agile cheerleaders can pin their incompetence on the engineers that inherit their mess when they cruise on up the ladder oblivious of their failures. All of this and not a shred of empirical evidence, ever, that it actually achieves anything other than obscuring management stupidity.

wheelinsupial 5y ago
> There’s an increasing mountain of evidence that shows agile just doesn’t work Do you have any keywords I can search for to find this evidence? I haven’t looked at in in ~4 years, but the Project Management Institute (PMI) used to publish some reports based on surveys that said ~70% of corporate projects fail. I am interested in comparing the evidence you’ve seen with the evidence the PMI has put together. Edit: I think the language is “70% of projects fail to realize the planned benefits” I haven’t looked at it in years, so I could be way off. I believe that projects that are completed 2 weeks late are classified as failures the same way a project that is abandoned half way through is.

travisjungroth 5y ago

Good ol’ intent vs impact. If you’re proselytizing something, it shouldn’t be judged by your intentions or how true it is, but the impact it has on the world. Agile was not great in that regard.