Like so many rants against Agile, this one assumes that it's intended to provide everything you need to take software from a drawing on a napkin to a fully functional, deployed product. The author goes even further and assumes that Agile is also supposed to provide a system of professional development, and all your R&D to boot. Why not blame it for not offering a guide to retirement investing while you're at it?<p>Agile is a process for managing software implementation. Period. You have to bring your own software design process, and if your company's is terrible (or nonexistent), don't blame Agile. You also have to manage your own software R&D, though you could certainly use the process to manage projects within R&D. But the idea that Agile somehow precludes R&D itself is ludicrous, no more sensible than saying it precluded your company from spending enough on marketing. Even sillier is the idea that it should provide some kind of career advancement plan. Agile is a software development process, not a personal development process. It doesn't (and shouldn't) offer a career roadmap any more than your build system does.
This is all true. I worked in a medium size (400+) fully "agile" organization There was constant short term thinking and seemingly nothing was properly designed or actually engineered.<p>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?<p>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.<p>We did, however, have lots and lots of unit tests. We spent about half of each "iteration" rewriting them due to the API problems.<p>I gotta laugh.
I don't disagree with the digs at Scrum and similar implementations of Agile, and I certainly agree with the spirit of criticizing (in the 'art critic' sense) the processes we use, instead of blindingly accepting whatever gets thrown at us.<p>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:<p><i>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”</i><p>Translation: instead of working the way I enjoy working, programmers have to work in a way I dislike, therefore Agile is terrible.<p>As a programmer, I <i>like</i> working on small features and projects, and the variety that comes from taking on different types of work.<p>Long-term stuff is nice too, but despite what you might think, not everyone gets excited about the same things you do.<p><i>often disallowed to work on improvements that can’t be related to short-term, immediate business needs (often delivered from on-high).</i><p>People being disallowed to work on core improvements happens in any kind of organization system.<p>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.<p><i>Atomized user stories aren’t good for engineers’ careers.</i><p>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?<p><i>5. Its purpose is to identify low performers, but it has an unacceptably false positive rate.</i><p>Absolutely no argument here. The constant tracking is demeaning and often counter-productive.<p>That said, I don't think Agile requires it, just specific implementations of it (like the aforementioned Scrum).
The best thing about this article is the linked book in the comments: "Agile: The Good, The Hype, and the Ugly". I suggest checking that out for a more nuanced view.<p>I think also the OP doesn't give agile/XP enough credit for the good things it has mainstreamed. For example:<p>- Sustainable pace (don't work > 40 hours week). Agile companies, in my experience, tend to have good work/life balance.<p>- Continuous integration. Release and integrate often.
Having read ken schwaber's "agile Project management with scrum" something like 8 years ago and hearing him speak, and working with agile teams during my most junior development I couldn't fucking agree more. I loved scrum when I first started using it, and I was a horrible developer back then. I pity anyone who had to work with me.<p>This article was strangely heartwarming.
To save repeating myself: <a href="http://blog.binarymist.net/2014/01/25/essentials-for-creating-and-maintaining-a-high-performance-development-team/" rel="nofollow">http://blog.binarymist.net/2014/01/25/essentials-for-creatin...</a>
This is a poor article on many levels. Even basic facts don't check out.<p>Agile didn't "grow up in web consulting", and it wasn't about dealing with finicky clients who couldn't be "managed". It came from enterprise both large and small, mostly not involved in web or consulting. In fact, it arguably started before <i>software development</i> did - see Kanban at Toyota.<p>Agile <i>software development methodologies</i> came from a real need to reduce the failure rate of software projects that was, even 10 years ago, closer to 50% than 0%. It attempted to provide ways to stop the <i>average</i> software project from running nearly 50% over budget. It waged war on the "big design up front" methodology handed to us by other engineering fields and acknowledged that in the real world, software development is often a wicked problem (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wicked_problem" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wicked_problem</a>) that cannot be solved until it is solved. It acknowledged that requirements change, and software takes such a long time to build, often by the time a large design is built it already doesn't do what it needs to.<p>Almost all the statements the author makes are misleading, or misguided.<p>Violent transparency? It's a good thing that helps software projects succeed.<p>Atomic little user stories? They embody the divide and conquer philosophy to break down the author's ambiguous "long-term projects" into small chunks that can be understood, tested, and estimated. And delivered <i>quickly</i>.<p>Shared ownership? Promotes respect of the team, organisation, and customer. Helps get rid of bat-cave developers who can't acknowledge genius other than their own. Helps diffuse any blame for failure.<p>Social organisation? Has little to do with agile methodologies and a lot to do with the enterprises that implement them. Some do it well, some don't. Scrum doesn't dictate that a product owner or Scrum Master is more important than the engineer. Contoso Shiny Widgets Inc. does that. Just like they dictate whether experience and skill are valuable in their teams, and whether they listen to their engineers about technical issues that cause the kind of technical debt that is hard to solve with "good design".<p>Exit strategy? Short term? What? Use an agile process when it makes sense. Stop using it when it makes sense. Of course the process is designed to be there forever - they're tools to be used by people trying to solve real problems. The nature of those problems changes over time.<p>Lack of R&D? Software development is prima facie the D. The R? It's entirely possible to do that in iterations. Agile processes certainly don't remove R&D - spikes are there almost exclusively for R, and they're a first class citizen in the process unlike pre-agile. Perhaps the author refers to those 'long-term' projects that more often than not end up nowhere?<p>Technical debt? The author doesn't understand agile at all. Agile has two main tools to help manage technical debt - fast feedback loops, and encouraging development in small vertical slices. The best agile has even more - XP promotes TDD, not prematurely optimising, refactor mercilessly among other things. Basically universally accepted ways to improve the quality of software.<p>Crunch time? No! Agile promotes sustainable pace. To help avoid death marches. Heard of those? They've derailed careers for good.<p>I'm no big supporter of Scrum - it lacks the software design guidelines of e.g. XP, and it's been abused by some companies for their own purposes (probably those the author has worked for). But it has some fundamentally good ideas, and since Agile methods have been around enterprises small and large have improved on many measurable metrics. It's the best we currently have - come up with something better.