Agile at 20: The Failed Rebellion

I once had it used against me to justify not writing tests ("processes and tools!"). We had meetings about bugs instead. Seriously. Complain all you like about perversion, that was a perfectly valid interpretation coz those hallowed commandments are, frankly, ill-defined bollocks.

The principles are better but still suffer the same problem. If the most efficient way to convey information in a dev team is face to face why don't you come over here and I'll whisper my pull request in your ear. Jesus.

There's no point complaining about the perversion of a thing that was never very specific about what it wanted to be in the first place.

Once people (especially managers) get specific about what agile means to them it turns out it means very different things to different people. This is entirely the fault of the originators.

One benefit of Scrum (the catholic church to agile's christian sect) was that it was proscriptive and was specific. Unfortunately it's also a bit shit and its practitioner-priests LOVE to tell you that if it isnt working, well, You Probably Just Weren't Doing It Correctly.

If that's true in an organization, its only because either management has failed to hire developers that can self organize, or management has constructed structures and incentives which inhibit self-organization by developers. Usually, both. Often deliberately, because line managers are often more comfortable passively recieving directives from above and crafting directives for below than any other mechanism of management, since this minimizes conflicts with those in organizational power positions.

For example, teams running Agile are very reluctant to give both a delivery date and a fixed set of features. They're willing to promise one or the other, but not both. And that's a problem, because the whole rest of the organization really wants to know when they can announce the release to customers. Planning for releases tends to be a really big deal, the pressure to make promises of both functionality and delivery dates is very strong.

Also, Agile methodologies tend to assume you are in close contact with the customer, who can tell you what they actually want and decide how things should work. But this is rarely the case; typically you have a PM or something like that who is in touch with the customers, and is supposed to understand what they want. But this person is rarely senior enough to actually make decisions; important decisions are made by a dev manager or a project lead or someone like that, with the PM just providing input and perspective.

Finally, Agile has this notion that everything is supposed to be handled informally, verbally, person to person. And that's fine for small tweaks to the product. But as soon as you start building something big enough that it takes months and crosses team boundaries, it gets really useful to have an actual document explaining how something is supposed to work. Such a document is an invaluable record on what has actually been decided, and anyone joining the project or wanting to contribute to it absolutely should read it. But Agile tends to discourage creating such documents in the first place.

Given that Agile clashes so hard with how actual organizations get things done, it rarely gets adopted in anything approaching a pure form. The practices that tend to get picked up might be called Agile-light: sprints, daily meetings, and task estimation in points.

Good Xs (where X = developers, managers, designers, etc.) can be amazingly effective and well worth it. This is obvious. The vast majority of managers out there are average, and so they are a necessary evil. Compare this to the situation: the vast majority of developers out there are average (I include myself in this group )... and this is fine, they are not seen as a “necessary evil”.