Healthcare.gov failed despite agile practices

My theory is that Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland came up with Scrum in order to limit management's ability to screw up software development in corporate settings. That was mixed with some observations about the need for iteration, not doing upfront work when it's wasteful (and it's not always wasteful) and visibility that came from the Agile manifesto.

However, one lesson I'm constantly re-learning is never underestimate people's ability to screw things up and I think Ken and Jeff underestimated.

The whole agile thing has been subverted and if indeed Healthcare.gov was done using "Agile" practices then this is another bit of evidence.

We, as software engineers, need to move away from these and figure out some way to qualify what makes good software engineering. You don't see non-technical hospital managers going around telling doctors where to place an incision and you don't see non-technical aerospace management telling engineers what bolt to use in a rocket engine. But for some reason "programming" has been demoted to something that just being "agile" is enough to do. Badly.

In his YouTube Scrum talk Ken Schwaber says something about if you have a poor team with bad engineering practices than Scrum will generate crap for you sprint after sprint. Somehow no one listens to that part.

The didn't need a bunch of "nimble", independent teams. They needed some early, stable requirements. Some early, hard deadlines that they had to hit. And a focus on making the fucking back end work, first.

The last thing this project needed was some sort of last minute "agile". Of course, now they'll attempt some variation of it, out of necessity.

I doubt we'll ever be able to distill it to a formula.

People ran successful software projects decades ago, long before any methodologies were formally described. And they have failing projects now, even when they use a supposedly good formal methodology.

Instead of another alternative to waterfall, scrum, or agile, I'd propose the following ingredients for success: Organized people, a good working relationship with plenty of trust, a clear understanding of roles and responsibilities, realistic expectations, and colleagues who honor their agreements with each other. To name a few.

All of this is peopleware, not process. Unfortunately, there's no silver bullet to get this stuff right.