The alternative to sprints is frequently no process at all, not the strawman waterfall. Yeah. I see criticism of agile/sprint/Scrum practices all the tim

The alternative to sprints is frequently no process at all, not the strawman waterfall. Yeah. I see criticism of agile/sprint/Scrum practices all the time and I just think: to what are these people comparing these practices? Developing a solo hobby project where there's no collaboration, scheduling, or management to worry about? My experience over 25 years in this industry has been that it's a fairly chaotic place, filled with meetings and management and overhead. Every shop, manager, and team generally had its own ad-hoc and ever-shifting "process" or lack thereof. I find that Scrum, while highly imperfect, is generally a step forward over that mess. I've worked on others where it was debugging, understanding existing code, research, and resolving circular situations and in those cases [estimation is impossible] Yeah. The only resolution to this is a healthy respect for the time it takes to produce an accurate estimate. That process must be viewed and respected as a separate task, with an according amount of time allocated to it. This is actually a fundamental concept of Scrum: https://www.agile-academy.com/en/agile-dictionary/spike/ https://www.agile-academy.com/en/agile-dictionary/spike/ But in my experience, teams absolutely shit the bed when it comes to this. Management wants estimates but does not want to allocate the time needed to come up with good ones.