BUILDING SOFTWARE USING “AGILE” AND “SCRUM” HAS TURNED TO BE A WASTE OF TIME AND MONEY FOR ALL CONCERNED –

I largely agree. Agile has been the bane of my existence. The problem with Agile is that there are so many things that looks good on paper which is why they sell so much of it. But as a whole, my experience is that it stretches development time by 2-4 times the duration and increases cost because now you have a product manager, a scrum master, a scrum coach and the client advocate who does the work of what used to be one experienced PM.

A team is only good as its developers. Give me 1-2 good developers and I can deliver under budget and on time under any process even agile. Have a traditional makeup of 20% good and 80% bad, the developer is so busy doing stupid agile processes like pair programming, and showcase setup so each sprint you only get 30% productivity and everything goes into setting up for the stupid showcase. Just let 1-2 developers work with a full understanding of the requirements and allow them to speak directly to client for constant feedback and you have a successful project, every time.

I hate that inception and user stories drive the requirements and most people enforcing it doesn’t even understand whats needed for a good developer to do good work.

Formal development processes exist BECAUSE so many developers are poor developers. For good developers, most formal processes only act as a hindrance. This is exactly why you’re observing what you observe. As is the traditional 80/20 rule, 20% of your developers do 80% of the work. Which leaves us with what to do with the remaining 80% of the team. Yes, they can contribute, but they require some type of process to follow otherwise they’ll get lost in the weeds every time. Sapping even more time away from the 20%. Management sees this as good because you get better utilization of the 80%. It may well result in a net win, if implemented correctly. But, of course, that’s not how the 20% want to spend their time – mostly.

Agile is really about neutering the 20% to make the 80% appear and/or be more productive. It’s a bridal to force the 20% to drag the 80% into the solution domain. For body count houses, this is great stuff. For good developers, it’s a nightmare.

Let’s face it, good PMs are harder to find than good developers. And good developers are as rare as unicorns. The result is that most projects get stuck in suckage-land, whereby the 20% are stuck fixing the issues caused by leadership, management, the PM, and the rest of the team. Which is usually compounded by the fact that everyone wants to work reactively rather than pro-actively. After all, who can possibly foresee that if you implement your solution with highly specialized patterns and that if the requirements change at all, it’s going to mandate massive refactoring. But, hey, there’s a reactive process for that, so it’s all good.

Excuse me, I have to go finishing butting my head into the wall for another couple of hours.

Agile is really about neutering the 20% to make the 80% appear and/or be more productive.

So, essentially it’s Common Core all over again?

Just let 1-2 developers work with a full understanding of the requirements and allow them to speak directly to client for constant feedback and you have a successful project, every time

But, muh project scope. I can’t trust developers to talk to normal people. /s

Pair programming that is another thing! Back in 2000 they also talked about pair programming. I tried it and it fails. It always makes the guy that is less developed feel dumb and ends up in depression. It causes stress in these developers which is a shame because some of them are very good at what they are doing, just less experienced.

I think you can have a bit of best of both worlds. Where I work we take the good parts of SCRUM and have left most of the shite behind. Bearing in mind we’re only 3 full timers and a half timer so that leaves us more flexible.

Having said that I had a deadline coming up my ass and lost time getting my presentation ready!!!!

I absolutely agree, and I believe leftists / liberals love it. Because they need a master, without a master they feel like they have no direction. Others hide behind the secret sauce, they are bad/poor at their jobs. In the same way they say… I WANT THE GOVERNMENT TO SOLVE ALL MY PROBLEMS! They want Scrum/Agile to be the authority that solves all their problems.

It’s so funny, accompanying AGILE/SCRUM at the company I work for is this “us” talk, where they treat Developers, QA, Devops/Admins like they are all equal. I’m a Developer for a reason, I want to write code. I’m not here to administra