Agile isn’t about speed, it’s about direction

It&#x27;s about whatever some commentator thinks its about this week in order to get blog hits, sell more books, or to appear influential or as a thought leader etc etc etc.<p>Most of us with a brain have looked at it and taken the best parts of what is there and incorporated into our workflow for ourselves and our teams, and dumped the rest.<p>The rest just parrot on the same talking points with a different angle every week.

I guess the “No True Agile” crowd is as alive and well as they were 10 years ago. When it’s a failure, they always come out of the woodwork to let you know you weren’t doing it according to the orthodoxy. When you point out that it isn’t faster in practice, they gaslight you and claim that was never the point in the first place.<p>In a way it reminds me of a cult. You do a series arcane rituals that have no scientific evidence behind them, none of the process is data-driven or statistically proven. Frankly, it can’t die soon enough but as we all know some new hype will simply take its place to give busybody managers a reason to exist.

I thought agile was an elaborate scheme divised by energy vampires to drain the enthusiasm of developers through the use of rituals.

It&#x27;s about both, it&#x27;s just that ritualized Big-A Agile isn&#x27;t about either. It&#x27;s about the appearance of speed and selling certifications to companies and management that don&#x27;t know better.<p>I think &quot;velocity&quot; (from Scrum) actually evoked the correct idea, but most people seem to forget that velocity != speed. Velocity is a pair, speed and direction. Raw speed is useless if you&#x27;re heading the wrong way (e.g., towards a solution for the wrong problem because you didn&#x27;t bother validating along the way).

Your semi-annual reminder that the promulgators of XP&#x2F;Agile all came from the Chrysler Comprehensive Compensation System which <i>failed miserably</i>: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Chrysler_Comprehensive_Compensation_System" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Chrysler_Comprehensive_Compens...</a><p>Beck, Jeffries, Fowler, Hendrickson, and Wells are examples of Failing Upward(tm) rather than any example of good programming to be emulated.

This quote summarises everything that is wrong with Agile.<p>&gt;&gt; rarely well implemented.<p>The Agile Manifesto was published in 2001, over two decades ago. After all this time, and the involvement of a lot of clever people, even Agile advocates are stating it is rarely well implemented. Doesn&#x27;t that suggest that Agile, as a management technique, has failed?<p>True Agile is appears to be as elusive as the holy grail.

It’s actually about getting management out of the way of letting engineers do their jobs.<p>There has never been a better strategy for letting engineers steer the ship and make decisions that ship code instead of getting micromanaged by non-experts that generally bungle things up and insert a bunch of external priorities without reconciling them with reality.<p>The reality in my mind is that agile is the reaction to excess management, which is a massive problem in technology organizations.<p>I’m sure there are other things too. Some of the other comments are gold. But that’s my 2c.

Nobody seriously measures &quot;speed&quot; in terms of how many words you type per minute.<p>HN is pretty much in agreement that lines of code per day is a bad measurement of progress&#x2F;accomplishment, right?<p>We&#x27;ve seen so many bad variations on this concept:<p>* Butts in seats means work is being done<p>* Movement is progress<p>etc. It&#x27;s all bunk, of course, and here we are with agile. Corporate types are collecting some metric and the larger the value the higher the developer speed. Or so they think.<p>Ideally, &quot;speed&quot; in this context <i>is</i> about direction. They are almost interchangeable. If you are going in the right direction, you have some amount of positive speed. Otherwise, it is negative or zero.

No, compasses are about direction.<p>Next.<p>Seriously, there&#x27;s very little substance to the article. It effectively says &quot;agile doesn&#x27;t work without customers.&quot;<p>I&#x27;m pretty sure &quot;customer collaboration&quot; mattered back when it was a developer movement and not some kind of training sold to management.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;agilemanifesto.org" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;agilemanifesto.org</a>

Anyone remember this? <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;agilemanifesto.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;agilemanifesto.org&#x2F;</a>

It&#x27;s about speed of changing direction.<p>Duh.<p>The entire supposed premise of agile is defining goals and constructing a product iteratively, so misunderstandings and changes in design can happen more quickly.<p>The &quot;quick&quot; part being a change in direction.<p>Given a perfect definition of a program and skilled ciders and unified vision from the beginning, agile would be meaningless.

For me, Agile is about risk migitation by early knowledge building.

Well it’s both imo - i.e., agile is about velocity.

Was the article created by a bot?

You are holding it wrong.

Give a break Agile is just an adjective. It&#x27;s the antonym of clumsy&#x2F;ungraceful.

or its lack thereof

Can we just be done with “agile”? As far as I can tell it’s like communism. Seems to make sense on paper. Every time teams try and follow it things fall apart, and the crowd points and says they just weren’t doing it right.<p>How about we just get the requirements and write the code, however that is best achieved in your org.