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In short, my experience with Agile is that is only adds a way to quantify what happens, so it definitely creates an illusion of productivity. I do see how it is

In short, my experience with Agile is that is only adds a way to quantify what happens, so it definitely creates an illusion of productivity. I do see how it is actually useful when talking to managers and investors about progress. However from the engineers' view it is just more of an administrative burden. In my view the "sin" that Agile committed was the promise of productivity, when really (from engineering viewpoints) it appears to be an unnecessary accountability mechanism. I worked in fiance once with Agile, where there exists in the culture an infinite growth mindset. So I found that we were putting a metric to everything possible, expecting future "improvements" and peoples' salaries were dependent on it. Some companies probably don't suffer from this though.

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azangru 1y ago
> Agile is that is only adds a way to quantify what happens, so it definitely creates an illusion of productivity > ... > I worked in fiance once with Agile ... I found that we were putting a metric to everything possible, expecting future "improvements" and peoples' salaries were dependent on it. It's fascinating to me how different a meaning different people put into the word 'agile'. The 'agile' of the founders was about small teams, close collaboration with the customer, and frequent feedback based on the real emerging working software, which allowed the customer to adapt and change their mind early (hence 'agile', as in 'flexible'). What it contrasted itself to was heavy, slow-moving organisations, with large interdependent teams, multiple layers of management between developers and customers, and long periods of planning (presentations, designs, architecture, etc.) without working code to back it up. All this sounds to me like an intuitively good idea and a natural way to work. None of that resembles the monstrosity that people complain about while calling it 'agile'. In fact, I feel that this monstrosity is the creature of the pre-agile period that appropriated the new jargon.

deleted 1y ago

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azangru 1y ago

> Agile is that is only adds a way to quantify what happens, so it definitely creates an illusion of productivity > ... > I worked in fiance once with Agile ... I found that we were putting a metric to everything possible, expecting future "improvements" and peoples' salaries were dependent on it. It's fascinating to me how different a meaning different people put into the word 'agile'. The 'agile' of the founders was about small teams, close collaboration with the customer, and frequent feedback based on the real emerging working software, which allowed the customer to adapt and change their mind early (hence 'agile', as in 'flexible'). What it contrasted itself to was heavy, slow-moving organisations, with large interdependent teams, multiple layers of management between developers and customers, and long periods of planning (presentations, designs, architecture, etc.) without working code to back it up. All this sounds to me like an intuitively good idea and a natural way to work. None of that resembles the monstrosity that people complain about while calling it 'agile'. In fact, I feel that this monstrosity is the creature of the pre-agile period that appropriated the new jargon.