<story><title>The age of cargo cult Agile must end</title><url>https://jchyip.medium.com/the-age-of-cargo-cult-agile-must-end-9408e1d13e1d</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>CSMastermind</author><text>The root problem in my estimation is that people want a boilerplate bureaucratic process which they can follow and achieve good enough™ results.&lt;p&gt;A lot of the activities done in agile or scrum or whatever processes are potentially useful tools in specific situations.  But people don&amp;#x27;t want to understand the history and reasoning behind the tools nor do they want to apply them judiciously as appropriate.&lt;p&gt;They &lt;i&gt;want&lt;/i&gt; a one size fits all process that produces results, if not optimally, at least consistently.  And whatever Agile flavor of the month is popular is just that, it&amp;#x27;s good enough.  And the benefit is that you get this fun mind trick to deflect blame (&amp;quot;I don&amp;#x27;t know what happened we followed the process.  People don&amp;#x27;t fail processes do.&amp;quot;) or (&amp;quot;I&amp;#x27;ll tell you what went wrong we didn&amp;#x27;t follow the xzy process.  If we had just agiled a little harder this project would have shipped on time&amp;quot;).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>penguinvondoom</author><text>IMO the main problem is in the very way organisations are structured - it is about power, and people (really meaning management) want to achieve good enough results, given that their control is maintained. 
Agile as aesthetics is cool, but actual implementations move power away from management and we can&amp;#x27;t have that. So we will rebrand project managers to POs and whatever managers to scrum masters, and will follow the rituals as long as they don&amp;#x27;t get in the way of normal run of things.&lt;p&gt;Agile was grounded on solid principles, but is very ideologically naive, which allowed its easy cooption by consultants and management.</text></comment>
<story><title>The age of cargo cult Agile must end</title><url>https://jchyip.medium.com/the-age-of-cargo-cult-agile-must-end-9408e1d13e1d</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>CSMastermind</author><text>The root problem in my estimation is that people want a boilerplate bureaucratic process which they can follow and achieve good enough™ results.&lt;p&gt;A lot of the activities done in agile or scrum or whatever processes are potentially useful tools in specific situations.  But people don&amp;#x27;t want to understand the history and reasoning behind the tools nor do they want to apply them judiciously as appropriate.&lt;p&gt;They &lt;i&gt;want&lt;/i&gt; a one size fits all process that produces results, if not optimally, at least consistently.  And whatever Agile flavor of the month is popular is just that, it&amp;#x27;s good enough.  And the benefit is that you get this fun mind trick to deflect blame (&amp;quot;I don&amp;#x27;t know what happened we followed the process.  People don&amp;#x27;t fail processes do.&amp;quot;) or (&amp;quot;I&amp;#x27;ll tell you what went wrong we didn&amp;#x27;t follow the xzy process.  If we had just agiled a little harder this project would have shipped on time&amp;quot;).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>keyraycheck</author><text>+1&lt;p&gt;I went all the way from Agile maximalist to common sense-ist.&lt;p&gt;For me agile these days is simply:&lt;p&gt;- talk to your team to sync often but short&lt;p&gt;- seek feedback (from stakeholders, ideally users)&lt;p&gt;- allocate time to work on your backlog so it nice and tidy&lt;p&gt;and technical stuff:&lt;p&gt;- release early, release often (i.e. CI&amp;#x2F;CD&amp;#x2F;devops stuff)&lt;p&gt;- automated testing, regular code reviews&lt;p&gt;- refactoring, working with small commits&amp;#x2F;PRs&lt;p&gt;More a common sense, than a &amp;quot;process&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;ideology&amp;quot;.</text></comment>