Yeah, Agile isn’t really at fault here. If done right - if you’ve got a scrum master, a proper product owner, proper planning and backlog grooming, etc. - it works really well. The problem is some companies think Agile is just “give the devs some pie-in-the-sky hopes and dreams, let 'em loose, and if they don’t give half a dozen execs exactly what they want (despite their massively conflicting ideas on what they want), cancel the project.”
Yeah, Agile isn’t really at fault here. If done right
This is what ticks me off about the “Agile” brand, it’s chock full of no true Scotsman fallacy (if a team failed while doing “Agile”, it means they weren’t being “Agile”).
I can appreciate sympathizing with some tenets as Agile might be presented, but the popularity and consultancy around it has pretty much ruined Agile as a brand.
Broadly speaking, any attempt to capture nuance of “best practices” into a brand word/phrase will be ruined the second it becomes “popular”.
This isn’t a case of No True Scotsman. There really is a right way and a whole lot of wrong ways to do Agile development. Any team that calls itself an Agile team that doesn’t actually follow the processes properly is doing it wrong and will fail.
That doesn’t mean any team that’s doing it right will succeed, but it’s like riding a horse: If you only climb halfway up the horse and try to hold on while at a 90-degree angle, it’s not going to work, and it would be stupid to declare that the concept of horse-riding is broken. No, it’s not broken, you’re just an idiot who thought you could ride a horse while only halfway up, clinging desperately to its side.
Agreed. The problem is people mistake “zero planning and structure” to mean “agile”. Of course it fails.
Agile to me was always mini waterfall. You always know who’s doing what, why, and what success looks like on a 2 week sprint horizon. When you see people on a sprint without a clear understanding of what they are doing over the next couple of weeks - then you know your project is in trouble for sure.
A more proper title would be “study finds 268% higher failure rates for poorly planned software projects”.
“Agile” as a word is mostly an excuse of poor planners for their poor planning skills.
Yeah, Agile isn’t really at fault here. If done right - if you’ve got a scrum master, a proper product owner, proper planning and backlog grooming, etc. - it works really well. The problem is some companies think Agile is just “give the devs some pie-in-the-sky hopes and dreams, let 'em loose, and if they don’t give half a dozen execs exactly what they want (despite their massively conflicting ideas on what they want), cancel the project.”
In my experience it’s just kanban, but make the devs feels guilty between sprints for not meeting their goals.
This is what ticks me off about the “Agile” brand, it’s chock full of no true Scotsman fallacy (if a team failed while doing “Agile”, it means they weren’t being “Agile”).
I can appreciate sympathizing with some tenets as Agile might be presented, but the popularity and consultancy around it has pretty much ruined Agile as a brand.
Broadly speaking, any attempt to capture nuance of “best practices” into a brand word/phrase will be ruined the second it becomes “popular”.
This isn’t a case of No True Scotsman. There really is a right way and a whole lot of wrong ways to do Agile development. Any team that calls itself an Agile team that doesn’t actually follow the processes properly is doing it wrong and will fail.
That doesn’t mean any team that’s doing it right will succeed, but it’s like riding a horse: If you only climb halfway up the horse and try to hold on while at a 90-degree angle, it’s not going to work, and it would be stupid to declare that the concept of horse-riding is broken. No, it’s not broken, you’re just an idiot who thought you could ride a horse while only halfway up, clinging desperately to its side.
Agreed. The problem is people mistake “zero planning and structure” to mean “agile”. Of course it fails.
Agile to me was always mini waterfall. You always know who’s doing what, why, and what success looks like on a 2 week sprint horizon. When you see people on a sprint without a clear understanding of what they are doing over the next couple of weeks - then you know your project is in trouble for sure.