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> It's for those who believe that skilled engineers are the true drivers of innovation and creators of meaningful products. Maybe the only thing I feel iffy about here. Just feels a bit naïve, I've worked together with some really talented designers. Also worked with some really talented product owners. Can't say I've agreed with every marketer/PR person I've worked with but they've saved our ass a few times. While I…
My first thought was: I would never want to work with someone who writes a rant like this. Because to me it shows a lack of empathy and self-awareness, I miss any sense or the slightest hint of humility.
Maybe the same can be said of this remark, that’s for you to decide.
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Individuals and interactions -- over processes and tools
Working software -- over comprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration -- over contract negotiation
Responding to change -- over following a plan
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I still like it. The problem is not the lack of a good manifesto, is that people don't get it.
Anyway, I like that someone else apart from me is thinking about these things! I don't know, maybe we do need a new manifesto to shake things up.
We’ve been through that, you leave coders alone without management and the create a new game engine with custom scripting language and state-of-the-art rendering pipeline and no games to go with it and then they get sad
(I’m only half joking to illustrate the point that extreme points of view are often silly)
I’ve never been a fan of Agile, but I find this rant superficial and crude. My first thought was: I would never want to work with someone who writes a rant like this. Because to me it shows a lack of empathy and self-awareness, I miss any sense or the slightest hint of humility. Maybe the same can be said of this remark, that’s for you to decide.
Are we really? The whole industry has moved on a good 10 years ago.
If you feel stuck with agile, you should probably change job.
When I hear about Agile these days, it's almost always an excuse not to do the right thing. The last time it came up was someone resisting defining our company's product delivery process, which has always suffered from a lack of clarity. The time before that, it was someone saying "Let's be Agile about this", but meaning "let's do a shitty version of this, and pretend we'll come back to it later, rather than just mov…
I think we'd end up doing this no matter what. If it wasn't "agile" it would be "brisk methodology" or "go-minded development" or something. The reality is people sort of just like having hand-wavy terms that they definitely know other people have heard before, but have been given an ever shifting definition for.
To that point, I've started hearing people say "kanban" or "iterative planning", explicitly as opposition to agile. Yet, there are no actual changes to the process. All the people are still here, doing the same jobs with newly renamed meetings of the same length. But we are "fighting the agile lie" because we don't say agile!
IMO, teams figure out what works for them. Totally agree that methodologies are worth being skeptical about. If you hire sharp smart folks, they figure out a stable way of working. Muddling along isn't that bad if you have smart people muddling!
> The "agile" development we're stuck with today is a joke Are we really? The whole industry has moved on a good 10 years ago. If you feel stuck with agile, you should probably change job.
The fundamental assumptions behind Agile are as valid as they were 25 years ago. The problem(s) are control freak managers who are incapable of coaching their teams into taking charge at the local level, devs "who just want to code" and not think for themselves about the larger context of the work, and bullshit "life coaches" using Agile coaching as a way to "break into tech" with no tech skills.
This is fundamentally a crisis of incompetence, where people are failing to implement what at its roots is a better way of working, in certain contexts anyway, because they fear giving power and control to the rank and file.