
Agile is great – Scrum is OK-ish - ccoggins
https://medium.com/@seandexter1/agile-is-great-ecf271f4e9a6
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BoiledCabbage
I read this on an article on HN (I don't recall exactly where), but it was a
useful perspective on Agile.

Essentially it argued that when people "analyze" the effectiveness of Agile
they often choose a "as-treated" approach instead of an "intent-to-treat"
approach. That is wrong. If Agile is supposedly a treatment for for the ills
of modern software development, and 95% of the teams trying to do agile are
failing, then that isn't a problem with people thats a problem with agile and
the agile manifesto. If Agile is so vague that almost noone team can get
agreement to do the good parts, and instead they all just do scrum (which is
deemed mostly bad) because only Scrum is detailed enough to follow, then again
that's a strike against Agile.

This eliminates all of the No-True-Scottsman Agile issues. Agile should be
judged by the amount of people trying to do Agile and failing. Otherwise it's
not different than "abstinence only" contraception. Yes it works if you adhere
to it, but majority of people fail to adhere to it. That's not a failure of
people, that's a failure of the prescribed solution. A better solution is
condoms.

Either make Agile prescriptive (which defeats the point of Agile), or declare
Agile almost valueless. Until someone comes up with a flavor of Agile to
counter Scrum, that actually follows the Agile Manifesto it's not worthwhile
to discuss Agile.

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jcims
Someone needs to come up with an agile method that helps teams operate in
nightmarishly bureaucratic orgs, wherr 3/4ths of your work is spent just
clearing the way to build something of value.

~~~
steve1977
It's called "get another job and leave that org"

