Agile In Their Own Words
230 years ago the people of France stormed a prison housing those punished for daring to question a problematic philosophy. This problematic philosophy, The Great Chain of Being, was a spropped up by what was originally a religion of compassion, tolerance, and justice that had been twisted and corrupted to the point of being intolerant, uncompassionate, and justifying the excesses of the people at the top.
Today, we find ourselves in a similar situation with Agile. Agile is a religion that preaches humanity and continuous improvement, but it has lead to the creation of work environments far more inhumane than anything that ever came before them. Agile is a software development methodology that works neither on a human level nor on a technical one, and it makes developers’ lives miserable. Agile is the Bastille we must storm today.
But every successful revolution requires at least a couple good essays. And so I set off to write the ultimate anti-agile essay, one whose power would offset the thousands of pieces of Agile propaganda on social media that are funded by the Agile Industrial Complex’s millions of self-perpetuating dollars.
And then I got stuck.
While I found through my own experiences that Agile was terribly problematic on a technical level, I just couldn’t put my finger on what combination of mismanagements interacted with Agile to kill or delay so many of the projects I worked on across many different organizations. So for an entire year I ended up browsing social media for the comments of others who felt the same way I did about Agile, hoping that their articulations could more sharply define my own. Whenever I found an insightful comment summing up the problems I had experienced on Agile projects, I added it to an ever-growing compendium of such social media comments.
A year later after collecting these comments, I still haven’t yet written the ultimate essay rebutting Agile. But maybe I don’t need to. As the words of many others speak more powerfully than anything I alone could say, I’ve decided to share this compendium in place of my ultimate anti-agile essay. I call it “Agile In Their Own Words: The Problem With Agile & Scrum”.
Agile In Their Own Words (https://github.com/rayfrankenstein/AITOW)
