Agile is a Sham

The world is full of mediocre programmers, and in each cluster of mediocre programmers you'll find that they're surrounding much better programmers.

Ergo, since mediocre programmers exist, agile isn't a sham, and is necessary. QED

Even for really talented developers - imo just because they are talented (they can code and can solve problems) doesn't mean they can play well within a team - especially in a team without any processes to guide them through.

I personally find the author's view on processes to be very naive - and a bit offensive, it's almost like saying if you employ processes, then you are stupid.

EDIT:

My thoughts in a separate entry: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3765693

I dunno. In a way I think he is right in some ways in that most of the times people say they are doing agile or scrum it is a sham and they are not really doing agile and also it generally doesn't tell you much about how well they work.

Also I think that process can very easily get in the way. I was actually thinking maybe things would work better for small teams if you just handled everything in a group chat room with a history like campfire.

But I still have hope that someday I'm actually going to use TDD for a project and then have way fewer regressions to deal with. Still haven't had the discipline I guess to really learn and apply TDD after all these years although I have sort of done it a little a few times.

And also a few other things like short iterations and getting the simplest useful software going which I always thought were part of agile, those things help. Although it has always been a battle for me to get managers or even users to stop adding features and do an initial release so I haven't been very successful in that aspect.

I don't know if the quality the individuals on the team is everything but it is a good point that it is probably more important than anything.

I also would really like to believe that having a real QA team as part of the process would improve things, although I have never had that luxury either so it may be a false hope. But that would be something in the process category.

"Agile is not a silver bullet" is more to the point, and applying it dogmatically can counterproductive.

But regular communication, short, well defined sprints and a prioritized backlog available to all can do wonders in terms of getting a small amount of stuff done rather than a large amount half done.

Let me say this. I have found scrum in particular to be used as a management tool (report back tool), and not a developer tool. It doesn't matter where i go. It starts with the greatest of intentions, and ends up where management are sticking there fingers in the pie half way through. And by that I mean they don't use priorities on the backlog to manage the process. They use the standup meetings as a moan session when things don't go there way. To me scrum in its purest form is where the developer drives the process. Most projects will perform better if they just let them do that.