

A community and forum to discuss and learn Agile Project Management - RalfR
http://agile-pm.io/

======
tdicola
This should be stickied at the top: [http://www.thoughtworks.com/talks/the-
death-of-agile](http://www.thoughtworks.com/talks/the-death-of-agile)

------
caminante
Why do you need another forum to discuss Agile?

I fear that michaelochurch's point that a taint fire's needed is appropriate.

------
michaelochurch
"Agile" is fucking terrible. It's an attempt to patch business-driven
engineering, which is like spraying perfume on a turd in an attempt to make it
smell good. Fuck user stories and fuck "iterations"/"sprints" and fuck "you
can only work on it if it's in the backlog" and fuck story points and fuck all
the meetings ("sprint retrospective meetings" that go on for 2 hours; how the
fuck is that agile?) and fuck this culture of enabling indecisive businessmen
by tolerating incoherent, rapidly-changing requirements and fuck this idea
that programmers (even with 5-10+ years of experience) are supposed to be
terminal juniors and be fucking happy about it.

I'm all for genuine _agility_ but this cottage industry of developer
fungibility and ritualized micromanagement needs to die in a fucking taint
fire.

~~~
wmeredith
Lots of piss and vinegar here, but little that's constructive. What's the
alternative? Waterfall? Chaos?

~~~
michaelochurch
Waterfall is a straw man. Waterfall and agile are two possibilities within
business-driven engineering (a euphemism for "you just code what we tell you
to do, we make the decisions").

I don't think Scrum is that terrible for junior engineers, but it provides no
exit. It's the terminal juniorness of it that has me bothered. I'm 31 years
old and have been programming for almost a decade and I'm too old to work on
"user stories". No, I don't mean "because of age, I'm too good to work on it"
because that would be bullshit; if it needs to be done and I'm the best person
to do it, then I'm not "too good" to work on anything. I mean that, at age 31,
if all I have to show for my time is a disjointed collection of "user
stories", no one will take me seriously.

If you're any good, programming evolves into an R&D job after 5 years:
exploring new technologies, testing new architectures, building whole products
and company-wide initiatives. Ideologies like Scrum are trying to take that
away from us. They probably provide some useful structure for junior
programmers, but they're alienating to senior talent.

~~~
maxerickson
How many people have you managed?

How many projects have you conceived and carried through to shipping? How many
of them are profitable?

I suppose Fermi estimates would be fine.

Those questions maybe have a snide undertone to them, that isn't my intent
with asking them. You post confident rants about how businesses should
operate, and I'm curious how much the above experience informs those rants.

~~~
fsk
That is a valid point. If you're so awesome, then why not start your own
business and clobber all those people who do stupid stuff like Agile and
Scrum?

I am slowly working towards this on my own, trying to get a personal side
project to the point where I can do it full-time. I'm just starting and only
spending a couple hours a week on it.

They used to be doing poorly-implemented Scrum where I work now, and I'm glad
they dropped it. Having a daily 30 minute status report meeting that never
started on time was killing almost an hour of productivity per day.

~~~
sheepmullet
"If you're so awesome, then why not start your own business and clobber all
those people who do stupid stuff like Agile and Scrum?"

As if it was that simple. My company is 80% waterfall and yet none of our
agile competitors can keep up. Is that because waterfall is better in my
industry? No, it's because there is a lot more to success than picking the
right development model.

