Agile Ruined My Life

I think there's something to be said for Scrum, and I think the shock therapy of a period of wholesale dogmatic adoption is the best way to start, with gradual backoff from Scrum dogma only after you appreciate the Scrum way, but goddammit you need to KICK THE CONSULTANTS OUT a few months after adoption and not let them set up camp inside your organization, playing politics to extend their gig as long as possible. The Scrum consultants in my company have been here almost a year. We know Scrum now. They still don't understand much about our business or our systems. Why are they here? Why do I keep hearing " says I can't do that," when is just a freaking process consultant who reports to a peer of your boss's boss? Why do we let them have that kind of power, when they only exercise it to pretend they still have something to teach us so we will keep paying them?

Also, the ScrumMaster role attracts the wrong kind of people. It attracts people who want power and want to be important. The desire for power conflicts VERY BADLY with being a good ScrumMaster, much worse than being a developer or manager or any other job I can think of. ScrumMaster is a simple role requiring only a little more process expertise than the chicken or pig roles. A ScrumMaster is a meeting facilitator. A ScrumMaster has no authority and no ninja skills. Being a ScrumMaster is like being the guy who can fix the printer. Having good ScrumMasters is very, very important, but they are not Important People. Does that make sense? They are not managers. People outside a Scrum team should not treat the ScrumMaster as a decision-maker or the proper conduit of information into the team. Bad ScrumMasters exploit those habits to aggrandize themselves and try to boss around their teams. Then they have power without responsibility.

s/Scrum/Management

FTFY.

No McMethodology can make crappy programmers write good code. Period.

(However, really bad management can make good programmers write crappy code too...)

But the ideas, on which Agile was built upon - like interviewing experts of the problem domain, extracting and preserving slang and vocabulary from the stories and keeping that terminology through data, code and even a markup by naming the same thing the same name everywhere. Design for changes, code for reuse, start early and iterate, adapt and evolve - all those ideas are working ones.

So, the problem is just with pre-packaged methods and forced techniques. Each group, each project should realize usefulness of some of those ideas by changing their habits and by practicing, not because some "guru" told you that something is such and such. It is the only way.

It is a common situation when some ideas replaced by routines and propaganda and authority of "teachers". Buddhism is the best example. The essence of Buddha's teaching is several simple ideas and conclusions from them. But in many places people have transformed them into sets of rituals, rules and endless empty talks.