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I can't take this Agile crap any longer. It's lunacy. It has all the hall marks of a religion. A lot of literature, a lot of disciples, hoards of money grabbing

I can't take this Agile crap any longer. It's lunacy. It has all the hall marks of a religion. A lot of literature, a lot of disciples, hoards of money grabbing snake oil selling evangelists, and no evidence at all that it works. In fact, as far as I can see, there's more evidence that it doesn't work. And the next person that says to me "derp derp derp, well it's better than waterfall herp derp" can go fly a kite. If you think we live in a world where there's only two ways to manage/build software, then you're a fool and have no business being in this business. Either start applying critical thinking or go sell crazy some place else. Maybe there is a perfect project out there, somewhere, and they're doing Agile right, and it makes the product better, and everyone on the team is happier and more productive. But I've never seen a project like that. In five Agile projects I've had the misfortune of working on or alongside, All I've seen is stakeholders making implementation decisions in ivory towers, developers being told to not implement that "delete" function because it's out of scope (it's out of scope because the designer and UX people forgot to put it in, but fuck it, we'll pretend you're right and it's meant to be like that), and teams pretending stuff works and everything is ok when in actual fact, it doesn't, and it isn't and if people could just stop looking a Jira and start looking at the code then maybe we could start to fix this hunking pile of crap and actually start being proud of our work. And before anyone weighs in with "Well those project clearly weren't doing Agile right", please, save your breath. Every project has been infested with people who have stacks of books on the subject. They love it, they suck it all up, they obsess over the minutiae of how to implement scrum, retrospectives, and sprints. They can talk of nothing else at work, at home, or in the pub. If they can't do it right, who can? And herein lies the point, there is no way to do agile right. What there is, is good project managers and bad project managers. There are good devs and bad devs. Good designers, bad designers. The good people will make good things in spite of having Agile forced upon them. Then the agile non-thinkers will jump on the bandwagon and lap up the good peoples success as if it were their own. Then someone will write a blogpost about how Agile made it all possible and it will all be lies piled on top of lies. Do I sound angry? Good, because I am. Agile is a con. People like agile because it absolves them of the responsibility to think and do their job. It makes my job a misery and it sucks money out of a clients pockets and to my mind is no better than theft. If you think I'm wrong, prove it. And I mean PROVE AGILE WORKS, WITH EVIDENCE or shut up. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. I didn't come into your life and tell you how to suck eggs, but if you're going to come into mine and do that, you'd better have data to back you up.

Swizec 14y ago
Here's the deal: There are people who do agile and there are people who talk about doing agile. The latter is riddled with "process" and is just as bad as waterfall. The former is a hodgepodge of "whatever has in the past worked for this team and was flexible enough to keep everyone happy while letting us have a modicum of an idea what stage the project is in". You want to work on the latter. Because it doesn't matter what you call your methodology, what matters is that it works and that issues users care about get fixed.
- tomelders 14y ago
  What I personally want to work on is a project where the project manager takes an active interest in where the project is at, by asking for updates and following progress and generally, you know, managing the project. As opposed to throwing a hissy fit because I've not taken time out of my busy day to fill out forms in whatever third rate piece of junk project management "tool" they've adopted so they can just run a report and pretend they've done their job.
  - ryanbrunner 14y ago
    Sorry you've been using bad tools. I must have missed the part of the Agile manifesto that requires that you use a shitty project management tool.
    - tomelders 14y ago
      It's not me choosing to use shitty tools. It's a symptom of agile non-thinkers.
      - ryanbrunner 14y ago
        Do you mind saying what tool you find so objectionable? There are a LOT of tools out there for project management. Some are absolutely horrible, for sure. Some aren't so bad. Ignoring that though, I'd say, if anything, Agile promotes using simple tools like wallboards (physical wallboards, with physical cards). I don't really think you can pin using a bad tool on the Agile community when they largely prefer not to use these tools in the first place.

Swizec 14y ago

Here's the deal: There are people who do agile and there are people who talk about doing agile. The latter is riddled with "process" and is just as bad as waterfall. The former is a hodgepodge of "whatever has in the past worked for this team and was flexible enough to keep everyone happy while letting us have a modicum of an idea what stage the project is in". You want to work on the latter. Because it doesn't matter what you call your methodology, what matters is that it works and that issues users care about get fixed.

tomelders 14y ago
What I personally want to work on is a project where the project manager takes an active interest in where the project is at, by asking for updates and following progress and generally, you know, managing the project. As opposed to throwing a hissy fit because I've not taken time out of my busy day to fill out forms in whatever third rate piece of junk project management "tool" they've adopted so they can just run a report and pretend they've done their job.
- ryanbrunner 14y ago
  Sorry you've been using bad tools. I must have missed the part of the Agile manifesto that requires that you use a shitty project management tool.
  - tomelders 14y ago
    It's not me choosing to use shitty tools. It's a symptom of agile non-thinkers.
    - ryanbrunner 14y ago
      Do you mind saying what tool you find so objectionable? There are a LOT of tools out there for project management. Some are absolutely horrible, for sure. Some aren't so bad. Ignoring that though, I'd say, if anything, Agile promotes using simple tools like wallboards (physical wallboards, with physical cards). I don't really think you can pin using a bad tool on the Agile community when they largely prefer not to use these tools in the first place.