

Why “Agile” and Especially Scrum Are Terrible - mecameron
https://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2015/06/06/why-agile-and-especially-scrum-are-terrible/

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greenyoda
Discussion from two months ago:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9672370](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9672370)

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lostcolony
Why is this on the front page?

This is an individual's ranting as he generalizes his own agile experiences to
everyone's, -even while he recognizes that the generalizations people make
about waterfall are straw men-. What an amazing lack of self-awareness.

Worse still, even if I granted him his points as broadly as he seems to want
to make them, and agreed that all agile/scrum experiences are like this (or at
least, those in consulting), he fails to give any suggestion as to how to
improve things. He dismisses both agile and waterfall. Okay then; how would
you do things differently? 'It’s time for most of “Agile” and especially Scrum
to die' \- fine, to be replaced with -what-? I'm not interested in
generalizations that you whine over; whether or not you're correct becomes
immaterial if you -legitimately offer me something better-. But this offers me
nothing.

~~~
stephengillie
> _Why is this on the front page?_

I've gone around and around with others, and apparently articles like this
must be interesting to most of HN's readership. It's got more than a dozen
points.

The Guidelines say to flag it and move on, but maybe we can get a nice meta
conversation going this time.

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hartator
Weirdly it's not on the home anymore - despite having more than 32 points in
less than 1 hour.

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dang
For the usual reason: users flagged it. Also, it's a duplicate.

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mr-ron
This guy has a serious axe to grind against some previous employer.

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nakor
I think there are enough employers out there that are implementing the version
of Agile/Scrum described in OP's post. I currently work at such company and
can relate with pretty much everything on that post.

The sad part is I'm not really sure what is better that will be accepted by
clients who now have become comfortable with Agile. From my personal
experience, if you're on a team with smart motivated people, Agile won't
really help you or increase your output. You will continue to deliver the
quality work regardless of story points, scrums, and all the other metrics.

If you're not on such a team, clients using Agile can now point to some number
and say "Hey, this number is 100 but you should be at 180. You are not
performing". I do agree that it gives too many false positives and generally
my attitude towards them (in cases where I have been the target) is to simply
reply "If you don't think I'm performing: fire me."

They usually walk away at that point mumbling something and I go back to work.

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perdhapley
The story of this article, is that this man is talking about why he is angry,
which is because agile is just not good enough for him.

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andrebrov
Another article about "How I didn't understand how to use fire and burn my
house and myself to death". And I guess he doesn't know agile history to talk
about it: \- "The “Agile” fad grew up in web consulting" \- It grew up in huge
enterprises in the beginning of 1990; \- "dealing with finicky clients who
don’t know what they want" \- just haha, I guess no one don't know what he or
she wants in terms of development; \- "second is appealing to a decision-maker
who’s recently been promoted to management" \- looks like someone got not a
best relationship with a managet in a past.

Didn't even read after 1 paragraph.

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anateus
This starts with a false statement--"The “Agile” fad grew up in web
consulting"\--and just continues downhill.

I'm going to try and not make this criticism a No True Scotsman, but this post
describes a vaguely Scrum-flavored approach that explicitly violates many of
its stated intents.

If the purpose of this post was to decry cargo-cult agile where the trappings
and software of Scrum or Kanban are adopted without paying heed to the intent,
I'd be wholeheartedly agreeing. But it seems the author has conflated the two.

If information is flowing only one way, from product owners to engineers,
whose only upstream delivery is their reporting, you're not looking at agile
but at some weird sprint-chunked waterfall process.

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rspeer
I assumed I know what a scrum is, given that I'm in one every day, and I can't
recognize what the author is talking about.

You're only able to give short-term updates? It takes 5-10 hours per week?
What even is this?

That just sounds like a sinkhole of terrible management, where some micro-
manager is scheduling a full-blown meeting every day and euphemistically
calling it a "scrum".

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russelluresti
[http://weeva.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/cant-
unders...](http://weeva.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/cant-
understand.gif)

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nirvanatikku
The rate this post is getting upvotes suggests that agile (and particularly
scrum) are indeed misunderstood. Eesh :/

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nakor
I've worked at a company where Agile/Scrum was implemented in beautifully and
we never thought to change the process.

However, I've worked more often at companies where Agile was either
misunderstood, or inserted into an already flawed/toxic process of development
as a magic bullet. I think there are enough places out there doing the latter
that warrants discussion of this post and how we can improve things.

~~~
nirvanatikku
Totally fair, and agreed on the value of such a discussion; Same deal -
seen/lived both. It requires fundamental cultural change (PM plays a big
part). When the discussion starts with teams engaging in poorly defined scrum,
I usually reference:
[https://www.scrum.org/ScrumBut](https://www.scrum.org/ScrumBut).

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hoodoof
Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.

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dang
We changed the URL from [https://shahworld.wordpress.com/2015/08/17/why-agile-
and-esp...](https://shahworld.wordpress.com/2015/08/17/why-agile-and-
especially-scrum-are-terrible/) which appears to be a spam copy.

