Agile is Poisonous

"We tried 1 week and 2 weeks iterations. Neither worked out. With short iterations there was a constant pressure to get shit done and technical debt accumulated like a huge garbage heap. It is impossible to squeeze a good solution into a short timeframe."

This is the most common Agile failure mode I've seen. You have to finish by the end of the iteration, so you're very heavily biased toward ugly hacks and Rube Goldberg machine coding. Elegance never fits in a sprint.

The last total Agile Kool-Aid drinker company I worked for also coincidentally had the most massive shit heap of code I have ever seen in production. It was a heterogenous mix of VB.NET, Ruby, Java, shell scripts, and Python running on Linux and Windows (and a bit of Mono on Linux), all glued together with duct tape and chewing gum. The Scrum Master was really proud of it, called it a Service Oriented Architecture. He could make pretty charts of it that made it look good, but if you lifted the hood it looked like garbage and required at least 10X the Amazon EC2 footprint it should have required. It was probably also a security nightmare, and was definitely hell to maintain.

That experience really destroyed my interest in Agile, since I could see very clearly how the problem was emergent from Agile's short sprint and exclusively deliverable-focused structure. The programmers were actually decent coders, and it wasn't really their fault. (Except maybe the heterogeneity...)

I generally agree, but I'm pretty sure this is supposed to be a parody...if not then this is truly absurd.

In all honesty, the shortcomings written about here are not a defect in the process(es), but appear to me to be simply weak project management. Especially since your ScrumMaster just up and quit. That is unheard of in a strong project-oriented culture.

You need a strong leader to get the team to buy-in to these processes. Of course nothing will work if you don't do that - people are generally averse to change and will do anything to prove "new ways" will never work.

It's definitely a parody, but it's disturbing how many seeds of truth are in there.

This is obviously an April Fools joke :-)))