Agile, with its warts and all, is far better than nothing at all. Yeah. You see criticism of agile, all of which is generally totally valid, but I never see a

Agile, with its warts and all, is far better than nothing at all. Yeah. You see criticism of agile, all of which is generally totally valid, but I never see alternatives mentioned short of "have a team of top X% developers with a clear shared understanding of all objectives and essentially no interference from management and no unreasonable deadlines." Which, well... I mean, great if you can get yourself into a situation like that. That sure is better than agile. It is the ideal I yearn for as an engineer. I just don't think that's realistic for most engineering endeavors. At some point, engineers need to recognize that interfacing with the rest of the company (product owners, etc) is a big part of the job and really embrace it. It's also typically the only part of our job that is not easily outsourceable, so it is in our best interest to embrace this.