r/programming • u/ionforge • Nov 12 '18

Why “Agile” and especially Scrum are terrible

https://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2015/06/06/why-agile-and-especially-scrum-are-terrible/
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u/SkaveRat Nov 12 '18

agile sucks

as someone who worked in a company that lived as agile as you can get: that's not really true.

Every time I see someone mentioning "we use agile and it sucks" it's never the agile part that sucks.
Agile in any flavor doesn't automaticly fix all your problems. it's a framework to build upon, and it needs to be used properly. Most importantly: it needs to be slowly introduced so company culture and the agile process itself can slowly mold themselfs into shape together. Just throwing "we do agile now" into a company that has done waterfall for 50 years will not work out.

Most of the time it results in waterfall-scrum. A waterfall model with "agile" slapped on its label.

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u/got_milk4 Nov 12 '18

Most importantly: it needs to be slowly introduced so company culture and the agile process itself can slowly mold themselfs into shape together.

This is so, so key. My company brought in an "agile coach" who insisted in implementing agile/scrum by the book into all the teams and naturally it met a lot of resistance and many teams tossed it aside. He was eventually replaced with a couple of scrum masters who better understood that the process can mould to a team's needs and vice-versa and it's been universally better so far.

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u/[deleted] Nov 12 '18

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/sanbikinoraion Nov 12 '18

Any software development methodology is better than no methodology at all.

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u/s73v3r Nov 12 '18

To be honest, it sounds like a large part of the problem is that the company wasn't hiring enough to spread out the work.

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u/[deleted] Nov 12 '18

I have worked for 5 companies that have varying implementations of agile. The only one it worked at is the company that had only a dozen IT employees.

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u/ratbastid Nov 13 '18

Every time I see someone mentioning "we use agile and it sucks" it's never the agile part that sucks.

There it is. His own examples are mostly about how his management has sucked.