Seven Things I Hate About Agile

But it's getting a little old. It seems the world is full of cranky, half-informed folks who get a little coffee in them and suddenly are ready to make grand pronouncements about the entire state of things (Love the self-recursion here)

Seriously, one last time. Agile is best practices around iterative and incremental development. It's not a standard, it's a marketing term. Because it's not a standard, criticizing it is like criticizing "good ice cream". What's good ice cream? Any damn thing you'd like it to be. Perhaps the author has a larger criticism of how stupid we all can be when implementing change. If so, get in line. There are a lot of us.

Scrum is a standard, and it's not changing anytime soon. You can call that a good or bad thing, but it's a very small subset of Agile, so it sounds more like a separate topic to me than the entire world of Agile.

I hate the way we implement change in technology organizations. Part of the problem we have, unfortunately, is that everybody feels themselves an expert on stuff they read about in a book and maybe saw it done badly a couple of times.

The more I think about this article, the more I feel like it's 95% marketing and 5% fluff. Apologies to the author if they are serious, but something is a bit off here. Not worth flagging by any means, but I'm not upvoting it.

ADD: Bit of a meta-note. Just this morning I wrote a story on some ideas about how to handle Subject Matter Experts in Agile teams. (shameless plug: http://www.whattofix.com/blog/archives/2012/08/who-moved-my-... ) The use of the word "Agile" in my article was very useful: it identified the topic as best practices around SMEs in iterative and incremental work. It is a dry topic, and I didn't claim to have all the answers, and it was more narrowly-targeted, so it didn't get a lot of traction. That's understandable.

But what I see happen over and over again is that wild hand-waving criticisms get a lot of traction on place like this because they can emotionally engage a larger audience. Practical targeted stuff? Not so much. So for the average developer who's just out of school and never has worked on an Agile team? I'm not sure they're receiving a very balanced look at things if all they read are from places where things are voted up or down based on emotional impact. It's another interesting and counter-intuitive side-effect of the voting/ranking system.

That doesn't make any logical sense. All that suggests is that you have n=1 experience with people over the age of forty.

As for observing that agile events in your neck of the woods are full of older people, there are many, many possible explanations for this and your blog post advances one without providing evidence that it is anything other than confirmation bias.

One thing I would do before making a statement like that is attend some other methodology events and check out the ages. If you go to a CMM conference, how old are the people? How about a PMP Institute gathering?

You may find that older people are more interested in methodologies while younger people are more interested in technologies. You might not, but your essay does nothing to establish that your explanation carries more weight than my conjecture.

And if my conjecture is correct, your point really should be that "Excessive interest in methodologies has the smell of death." That might be true!

I am not saying you're wrong, only that your essay is not persuasive on this one point.

He actually contradicted himself a lot of times: - "old people": Being a developer for a relatively small period of time, but I really have a hard time talking about agile with old developers. At least is what happens here at São Paulo/Brazil. - "stagnation": Agile is not Scrum. How about XP, TDD, etc? He says there is not much action in agile-world by arguing that people spend their time making lots of non-agile tools. Without a proper explanation of what he is talking about it is almost hopeless to try on and get something out of this point. - "Imposing values": Contradiction again. First he complain about having to accept values. He even say that values are not important at all to productivity and collaboration by saying that goals are important. I may be wrong here, but goal could quite easily be considered a value in the same context.

I won't even continue on this list since I am just probably pissed with the whole thing, but I really would like to have a discussion on this to see in what page we find ourselves.

It is really sad to just read complains without any solutions or proper presentation of the problems. It makes everyone who really put some grasp on agile teams or tools look like a moron by offering a mysterious solution. It just looks like a TV show to me, not a tech or even a blog post.