Agile was something… but soon become nothing
From the second link posted below:
The fact that Scrum is usually imposed on teams is blatantly anti-agile, yet rampant. The Scrum master is now treated as a project-management role, though it was originally a shared, rotating responsibility within the development team.
I have been thinking about this post for too long. What to write about Agile? I have experienced a big deal of corruptions and versions of those things, but I never read much about Scrum (the original concepts) or any of the bastard children that came out of the Agile Manifesto. And to write something interesting, I should learn and know it in deep. But to be honest, time is precious and wasting it to learn something that I don’t like already and I think provides me with no value, felt like a bad idea.
So I decided to compile some amount of articles written by people who already knows those methodologies in deep and offer them here. For my future self and for others who may be interested. Those articles are deep, well written and done by people that knows the details, which means those articles are way better than anything that I could write or explain here. I hope you enjoy!
Articles and Notes of the Corruption of Agile
On how scrum daily feels like wasting time that could be used in solving problems https://softwaremaestro.wordpress.com/2007/06/30/scrum-master-jar-jar/
And how I used a bot for a few months that had the same utility: what did you do yesterday, what will you do today, do you have any blockers. And that was it.
What is wrong about Scrum https://techbeacon.com/app-dev-testing/why-scrum-sucks and the truth is: “Scrum is the agile overcoat that corporations buy to drape over their waterfall processes”.
Scrum is all about the project management, not the software. Therefore, Scrum per se is not an “agile” software-development method—because it is not a software-development method at all. How did this confusion occur?Scrum is not agile: https://ronjeffries.com/articles/018-01ff/scrum-not-asd-1/ Scrum itself has no software-focused elements. No software principles or practices.
Agile won because everyone wants to be called Agile. But failed because almost no one is agile: https://www.simplethread.com/agile-at-20-the-failed-rebellion/
The important piece that gets forgotten is that Agile was openly, militantly anti-management in the beginning. For example, Ken Schwaber was vocal and explicit about his goal to get rid of all project managers – not just get the people off his projects, eradicate the profession from our industry.This is a good one in regards to Scrum measuring the wrong things. It is more interested in knowing how long a task will take than to make the things that need to be done.
Scrum fits nicely into the manager’s schedule, but not the maker’s schedule. https://www.aaron-gray.com/a-criticism-of-scrum/
“many of the people who advocate Scrum are non-technical – they may have never been a developer or practiced any other modern software development methodology because its not their job to write code.”
“Scrum teaches Project Managers that they can be a great leader of a software development team without knowing anything about software development.”The talk about how Scrum killed Agile and it forgot how to be agile, by Robert C. Martin (one of the creators of Agile Manifesto)
“The word “agile” has been subverted to the point where it is effectively meaningless, and what passes for an agile community seems to be largely an arena for consultants and vendors to hawk services and products.” https://pragdave.me/blog/2014/03/04/time-to-kill-agile.html
A really good practical take on why agile and scrum are broken or corrupted. They have been coopted and made meaningless https://medium.com/@christine_10050/how-scrum-is-broken-fe002038c92d
Some Thoughts on what I read above
Main problem with Scrum: it is obsessed with processes. Actually it calls them ceremonies, as any religion would do with their own “processes”. And, as religions, it seems as they do not really pay attention to the usefulness or results of those processes. They became ritualistic and, therefore, useless by themselves.
For years I’ve been working in different organizations that claimed they were Agile, or they used some kind of agile framework (or perversion, for that matter). However I was confused, as each one of those companies worked in a very different way between each other, so I decided to take a look to the origins of Agile and what was the foundation and core ideas. And the conclusion was clear: I barely experienced a methodology that was even close to the core ideas of Agile. Different names, fancy graphs and schemas, positions… but nothing even close to real Agile ideas.
So I become aware and hesitant everytime a company tells me “we are Agile!”. They don’t know what that means. They don’t care what that means. It is a fashion word and they use it, but the ideas behind it… fuck it, they are a company and they want to have control. Agile doesn’t give them control as they like it, so they keep the name, not the ideas. And that may be the reason why Scrum took over companies, people were certified with fancy titles like Scrum master and bs like that, others became consultants in Scrum or Agile to continue to spread their uselessness to others in exchange of a big check… and here we are. If we are really honest, a Scrum master is just a kind of secretary+carrier position, taking notes on meetings and sending the messages or things said in those meetings to another meetings where they take notes, and carry that to another meeting… while having 0 or low technical background.