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You're not trying to be constructive. You're blindly trying to force your points through without shouldering your responsibility to provide proof for your claim

You're not trying to be constructive. You're blindly trying to force your points through without shouldering your responsibility to provide proof for your claims. The only credible evidence I can find about Agile's supposed benefits is the Voke report, which warns against using agile. With only 28% of participant reporting success with an Agile approach. That's bad. Plain old fashioned bad. It's like I'm debating a creationist. Your logic is circular. You want me to believe the Agile works, and you're more than happy to tell me how wrong I am, but you shoulder none of the responsibility to prove your claims. At best, you're suffering from confirmation bias, but I think that's being too generous. And stop talking about waterfall. It's a false dichotomy. You're the only one making that comparison. Your argument, as far as I can tell is two fold. Some process is better than no process: Well I think every sane person would agree with you there. Agile is process, everything else is no process: Wait... what? How do you keep on arriving at that conclusion over and over again? And don't even think about saying "waterfall" because I swear to god, I'll punch my computer so hard it'll knock Google off the internet. Find me evidence as compelling and credible as the Voke report, supporting agile, and we'll talk sensibly. But I'll go out on a limb and say you can't, and you won't. Because if I were to draw on my anecdotes and present them as evidence, Agile is universally bad and dooms everything it touches to failure or 'third-rateness'. That's all the experience I have to draw on. And I suppose that's my biggest bug bear about Agile. Teams always finish things wether some fool is ramming agile down their throats or not. There's no other alternative. But Agile takes great ideas, shatters them into a million pieces and churns third rate approximations of that good idea out the other end. Without Agile, I've seen projects that were horribly mis-managed but the output was still great and once all the screaming was over, I was proud of my work. There's something about Agile that makes for crap products, and I feel so ashamed of the output that I wont even put my name to it.

derefr 14y ago
> Agile is process, everything else is no process: Wait... what? How do you keep on arriving at that conclusion over and over again? And don't even think about saying "waterfall" because I swear to god, I'll punch my computer so hard it'll knock Google off the internet. As far as I've been able to ascertain, in practice, "Agile" means "not waterfall". Fullstop. As in, any process that isn't waterfall, is called "an Agile process." You can be "agile" by just goofing around with no big plan; if the work gets done, you can look back at the points where you made little plans, and say "well, see, we were doing Agile." Any [successful] process other than waterfall, when post-hoc analysis is applied to it, will look like the classic definiton of an "agile" process, no matter whether you were trying to execute capital-A-Agile at the time! And I'm not saying that in the "the Agile people are right" sense. I'm saying it in the vacuous sense: that the term "Agile" is meaningless other than in that it means "not waterfall." Waterfall is doing design once, at the start of the process. If you ever do design again at any point, ever break your design up into pieces and postpone some of them, or design this feature at a separate point than that feature--then you're not doing waterfall. And so, the Agile people will say, you're "doing Agile." That's it. That's all they mean. You've designed more than once. And your response should be "...so what?" (But it should also be, in a more diplomatic sense, "well, then we're all doing Agile already anyway, aren't we? You've long won this Quixotic crusade against the Waterfall windmill; we all agree that 'Agile' (to this vacuous definition) is the right thing to do. Now let's all go out for a pint.")

derefr 14y ago

> Agile is process, everything else is no process: Wait... what? How do you keep on arriving at that conclusion over and over again? And don't even think about saying "waterfall" because I swear to god, I'll punch my computer so hard it'll knock Google off the internet. As far as I've been able to ascertain, in practice, "Agile" means "not waterfall". Fullstop. As in, any process that isn't waterfall, is called "an Agile process." You can be "agile" by just goofing around with no big plan; if the work gets done, you can look back at the points where you made little plans, and say "well, see, we were doing Agile." Any [successful] process other than waterfall, when post-hoc analysis is applied to it, will look like the classic definiton of an "agile" process, no matter whether you were trying to execute capital-A-Agile at the time! And I'm not saying that in the "the Agile people are right" sense. I'm saying it in the vacuous sense: that the term "Agile" is meaningless other than in that it means "not waterfall." Waterfall is doing design once, at the start of the process. If you ever do design again at any point, ever break your design up into pieces and postpone some of them, or design this feature at a separate point than that feature--then you're not doing waterfall. And so, the Agile people will say, you're "doing Agile." That's it. That's all they mean. You've designed more than once. And your response should be "...so what?" (But it should also be, in a more diplomatic sense, "well, then we're all doing Agile already anyway, aren't we? You've long won this Quixotic crusade against the Waterfall windmill; we all agree that 'Agile' (to this vacuous definition) is the right thing to do. Now let's all go out for a pint.")