> The worst part of these methodologies is that there's no evidence that they work. I think it's worse than that. The management that promotes these bastardize

> The worst part of these methodologies is that there's no evidence that they work. I think it's worse than that. The management that promotes these bastardized "Agile" methodologies are often hostile to any empirical data that raises questions. It's not for a lack of evidence, it's that the methodology is elevated to untouchable status and any evidence to the contrary is explicitly suppressed and ignored. Take the example of "story points". If all planning is based on story points, and all sprints are based on executing those stories, surely each sprint retrospective would look at how well the original points aligned with objective reality - use the empirical data and compare it to the estimated story points in order to refine the theory. This is the basic scientific method! Yet I've found that teams systematically avoid any such analysis. In the worst cases, I've seen teams explicitly forbidden from discussion story points in the retrospective ("How dare you attack the methodology with empirical data!").