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Andy Hunt - one of the originators of the Agile Manifesto, and NOT your humble submitter - has concluded that Agile has lost its way:
in the 14 years since then, we‘ve lost our way. The word “agile” has become sloganized; meaningless at best, jingoist at worst. We have large swaths of people doing “flacid agile,” a half-hearted attempt at following a few select software development practices, poorly. We have scads of vocal agile zealots—as per the definition that a zealot is one who redoubles their effort after they've forgotten their aim.
And worst of all, agile methods themselves have not been agile. Now there‘s an irony for you.
How did we get into this mess?
The basis of an agile approach is to embrace change; to be aware of changes to the product under development, the needs and wishes of the users, the environment, the competition, the market, the technology; all of these can be volatile fountains of change. To embrace the flood of changes, agile methods advise us to “inspect and adapt.” That is, to figure out what‘s changed and adapt to it by changing our methods, refactoring our code, collaborating with our customers, and so on. But most agile adopters simply can‘t do that, for a very good reason. When you are first learning a new skill—a new programming language, or a new technique, or a new development method—you do not yet have the experience, mental models, or ability to handle an abstract concept such as “inspect and adapt.” Those abilities are only present in practitioners with much more experience, at higher skill levels
Andy also has some thoughts on how to correct this - starting with the idea that Agile methodologies must be applied to Agile methodologies, to allow them to adapt to changing needs.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 09 2015, @04:25AM
Having watched agile (specifically scrum) fail at my company I can tell you why it failed there.
They didnt bother doing it. They skipped steps like define and revisit retrospective. They never bothered with story points.
They didnt want to 'waste time' defining things. They have no idea what 'done' means. They turn standup meetings into 2-3 hour long marathons of bitching. Instead of defining issues and marking them down to be worked on. They happen every 1-2 weeks instead of every day.
Their idea of 'scrum' is write it in a big list and say it will take 2.3 days. With no idea why it took 6 days. Then plot it out in project and the 'iteration' is 3.6 months long. If that sounds like waterfall. It is. But with the trappings of scrum.
I literally have not opened up the scrum tools in 3 months and just burn down stuff on my own with postit notes and the whiteboard in my cube. They turned something *easy* to do into a major chore.
I try to get them to use better tools that fit what they do but they do not bother. So I dont either.
Many times things fail not because the process is 'bad'. But simply because you never even gave it a chance.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by fleg on Sunday May 10 2015, @01:34AM
yup, as can be seen from the comments here there is a lot of misunderstanding of what agile (scrum/xp) is. they label what they do as 'agile' and then say "look it sucks". very odd.
as to yourself AC, at least when you look for another job you'll know what to ask at the interview. whats your definition of done? who's the product owner? how longs the sprint? what came up at your last retrospective? how do you do story estimation? do you do continuous integration? whats your test coverage like? and so on.