Why “Agile” and especially Scrum are terrible

This article was strangely heartwarming.

External facing APIs changed regularly, affecting other teams and leading to slow and painful integration. By regularly, I mean just about every sprint. How about thinking more than 2 weeks ahead?

It didn't help that there were lots of inexperienced guys just out of college (who probably thought this was normal.) Along with a "manager" with extremely poor communication skills (not uncommon in development) this was basically a disaster.

We did, however, have lots and lots of unit tests. We spent about half of each "iteration" rewriting them due to the API problems.

I gotta laugh.

That said, I think this post falls short at acknowledging the difference between the general Agile concept and Scrum as a particular implementation (of which there are many), and I have a few further disagreements:

Instead of working on actual, long-term projects that a person could get excited about, they’re relegated to working on atomized, feature-level “user stories”

Translation: instead of working the way I enjoy working, programmers have to work in a way I dislike, therefore Agile is terrible.

As a programmer, I like working on small features and projects, and the variety that comes from taking on different types of work.

Long-term stuff is nice too, but despite what you might think, not everyone gets excited about the same things you do.

often disallowed to work on improvements that can’t be related to short-term, immediate business needs (often delivered from on-high).

People being disallowed to work on core improvements happens in any kind of organization system.

Around here, we use "processes [that] promote sustainable development" and which allow us to "maintain a constant pace indefinitely." That means occasionally allocating people to refactor and improve the codebase, when the programmers feel that need and point it out.

Atomized user stories aren’t good for engineers’ careers.

Well, then it shouldn't be hard to show that engineers with Agile-based work experience have more difficulty getting hired. Is there evidence on that?

5. Its purpose is to identify low performers, but it has an unacceptably false positive rate.

Absolutely no argument here. The constant tracking is demeaning and often counter-productive.

That said, I don't think Agile requires it, just specific implementations of it (like the aforementioned Scrum).

I've been doing scrum for about a year, and while I think agile is excellent because of the feedback look, I also think scrum is the worst agile method. Mainly because non-technical management will turn it from managing software implementation, into managing employees. But it's worse because you have to tell everyone your progress, and god forbid you actually have a problem and fuck up that sprints velocity. I was almost fired once because my velocity was half of what it normally was one sprint, due to basically dropping development work and doing devops for a week.

I've been on a project where we had marketers join our sprints, and we're even assigned stories. Timeboxing genuinely difficult problems into two weeks is extremely stressful, and most product owners don't care about complexity, only results. I've had to make some super nasty hacks just to help get a "win" to make a client happy. True scrum is just too rigid for applications with complex problems, which is why you'll have a hard time finding two places that do scrum the same way, or keep processes consistent sprint after sprint. In my opinion, I find kanban to be a much more effective way in managing development, as it allows your engineers to actually solve problems. So I agree that agile is effective, but I don't think scrum is always the answer.

Sorry about the word vomit.

It's more about breaking down development into small chunks at a time, so that if there are performance (or specification, or other) issues, they can be dealt with quickly.