from Hacker News

Agile Is a Tainted Term

by peterkonsz on 2/17/24, 4:25 AM with 107 comments

  • by i_have_an_idea on 2/17/24, 9:37 AM

    Agile/Scrum is one of those things that are impossible to criticize. You can come up with a well-reasoned critique of Agile and there's always some Agile evangelist that pops up to tell you that you're not doing "real agile" and, therefore, your experience is invalid.

    At the same time, I have now done software engineering for over a decade, in many roles and teams, and I have never seen Agile or Scrum to lead to the development of a good piece of software. I guess we were using it wrong.

  • by sime2009 on 2/17/24, 11:43 AM

    The rarely discussed cornerstone of Agile is trusting the team and letting them organise themselves. For most organisation this represents a huge internal change in power structure.

    The Agile industrial complex can't really sell a message to their customers (i.e. managers) that the development teams should have the power and run themselves how they feel fit. This message amounts to "if this works, we can fire the managers". Not a popular message for managers.

    So, instead of building on an agile foundation, companies just add some story points and funny sounding meetings on top of the old structure and nothing really changes. It is Agile cosplay.

  • by SPBS on 2/17/24, 8:52 AM

    I wish more people understood this. Nobody should be arguing for Agile anymore. Don't say "no, but-" or "that is not what the Manifesto says-" because you're only strengthening the case for Agile as propagated by the fraudmasters simply by virtue of it sharing the same name as the thing you're arguing for. Leave the term behind, find something else.

  • by SideburnsOfDoom on 2/17/24, 9:38 AM

    Yes. What I have said before, for the same reasons, is that when the average office that says "we do the Agile", what they mean is that they have top-down, upfront planned micromanagement via tools such as Jira. *

    This has nothing in common with the values of the Agile Manifesto. In fact it's more like the opposite of them.

    * I hate Jira. Jira is not the cause of the problem. People's desire for a tool like that is cause of Jira. Kill Jira, and it would soon be replaced with something much the same.

  • by 4pkjai on 2/17/24, 10:12 AM

    A sales guy told me his team does Agile. I asked him what he meant.

    “We have don’t have assigned desks”.

  • by KevinMS on 2/17/24, 10:04 AM

    Dave Thomas has a talk about this

    Agile is Dead https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a-BOSpxYJ9M

    To oversimplify it, he says "agile" has become a noun when it was always meant to be an adjective. In other words, if you are "doing" agile, you aren't really being agile.

  • by codex_beta on 2/17/24, 12:06 PM

    The agile approach is generally academic mumbo jumbo that is rarely effective/efficient in large-scale industrial practice. Coming from an industry where functional safety is paramount, I think the agile approach is rarely appropriate unless you want to effectively waste everyone's valuable time with unnecessary overheads. If the product has already been launched or is at a pre-launch stage AND the team is small and professional enough, it might even work, but then why bother with such processes and roles overheads in the first place!

    Irrespective of the chosen approach, it’s crucial to systematically elicit requirements, document specifications, and rigorously verify and validate everything. Implementation should ideally be supported by thorough unit tests, and, most importantly, all artifacts must be traceable across different abstraction layers and to the required level of detail.

  • by chris_nielsen on 2/17/24, 8:54 AM

    Page wont load for me. BUT, this title is the first sensible thing I’ve heard someone say about Agile in 10 years.

    I just don’t use the word Agile. Too many people like it for the wrong reasons, or hate it for the wrong reasons. Everyone has a different understanding of it. It’s just not useful.

    If I say “let’s use Agile” it’s just going to lead to arguments and misunderstandings.

    Id always rather be more specific about which Agile idea I think will be useful. E.g. “let’s build a prototype before we waste time planning too much detail” or “lets get something built and released so we can learn more about what our customers want” etc.

  • by quectophoton on 2/17/24, 8:35 AM

    The closest I've found to agile is when a team says they use "extreme programming", but I still find it funny that even EP goes against the "Individuals and interactions over processes and tools", or at least walks a tightrope on whether it's a process or not.

  • by koreth1 on 2/17/24, 8:05 PM

    Scrum is the thing that has tainted "agile" in my opinion, because Scrum is so widespread that many people think they're the same thing.

    Leaving aside the "agile is a philosophy, not a methodology" argument, there are well-defined agile methodologies other than Scrum. I've worked at a couple Kanban shops and, while our dev processes were far from perfect, most of the things people routinely hate about "agile" just didn't come up at all because they're actually Scrum features.

    If the thing you don't like involves the words "sprint" or "standup," you are complaining about Scrum, not agile.

  • by Tabular-Iceberg on 2/17/24, 10:59 AM

    Another problem is that the Agile OGs keep overselling their methodology.

    They keep saying that waterfall just doesn't work, yet almost all commercially successful (and unsuccessful) software is produced that way, whether they claim to use Agile or not. Would it be better if they used "real Agile"? Of course! But you only ever have to be just good enough.

  • by benbruscella on 2/17/24, 11:31 AM

  • by EchoChamberMan on 2/17/24, 5:54 PM

    As soon as "agile" became "Agile" with a capital A, the war was lost. "Doing" Agile is missing the point; one must be agile.