Agile Ruined My Life

Implementing scrum turned our team from productive and mostly free of overhead to overbearing, involving a lot of long ass meetings (all meetings are long if you have to stand) and produced a lot of additional confusion. The interesting thing is that previously, with our specs and our so-called waterfall approach were were more agile. It happened naturally as we naturally did incremental development and we naturally talked to each other when we needed to, with no annoying scrum meetings and asinine bs from managers. People say managers have no voice at scrums, but what is a scrum master anyway? Everyone who doesn't write code is a manager and their opinion can interfere with progress. And of course the idiot child product manager would constantly lecture people about talking too much, except she would never shut up herself.

Even if a meeting is 15 minutes, if it is irritating, insulting, distracting and undermining, then it negatively impacts productivity for at least an hour after. I took to. Having breakfast afterwards, where I normally wouldn't eat breakfast, just to get centered so I could get some work done for the rest of the day.

I left that company soon after. If I had stayed i would have gone postal, or had to hire a lawyer to sue them under the ADA for torturing me by making me stand and listen to sanctimonious bullshit from idiots.

People say, when a bad experience is described that it wasn't being done right. Well i see no difference between what i experienced and what is being advocated.

Yes, there is a lot of anger towards the agile movement because it was sold as a tool to pointy haired bosses to impose, rather than a grassroots movement among engineers that embraced flexibility.

That said, on my own we've adopted a number of so-called agile methodologies like incremental and iterative development.

But the whole movement I'd oriented around imposing ideology on people. This is wrong.

For instance, whenever unit tests or test driven development comes up the proponents act like anyone not doing things this way is incompetent. I think the reverse is true, but I would never say there is ONE TRUE WAY. Agile proponents often seem to say there is only ONE TRUE WAY.

Also, don't mod me down just because I work differently to you. This is the ideology of the ONE TRUE WAY that is just wrong.

Programmers come in all shapes and sizes. They actually can be productive and work in a different than I do or you do.

Amen.

The greatest success I've had is using a hybrid approach of agile and waterfall. But, let's face it, Agile is anything but agile when it comes to the process. The Agilists out there will be the first to beat you over the head when you don't follow the process by the book.

Sure, didn't mean to come off as disagreeing with you, as your article makes many of the same points. Just venting because so much of these ideas have become an ideology....I respect that you are advocating a non-ideological approach.

The idea that "being agile" is a fixed process that you can write down and teach to people seems to me to be a contradiction in terms. If you have to train people how to do it, and have meetings about it, and read books about it, how can you possibly be agile?

Actual agility is the ability to quickly adapt to changing circumstances. To do that as a team you need trust, and great communication. No process can give you either of those things if you've not got them, but a bad process can certainly take them away.

As a young software developper, what really bores me with Agile, is the name, the shiny box you put things into, where it should just be named "Good practices for software developement". It's the mentality of selling things as products, with some kind of prebuilt ideology and aesthetic built along with the core, that really makes me run far far away.

I don't want to be sold a product. The fact that it led people to try new ways of developping software, be it TDD or pair programming or whatever, is good, but heck, just give me the core idea, remove the gift wrap, and go away. I don't want nor need some kind of new age manager coach.

Anyway, the article seems to be making this very point in some way, but then, why the name agile ? Well for marketing of course. So, while i sort of agree with the article, well i'll just be far away looking, thanks.