Agile has failed. Officially.
Either I’m a gifted oracle, and all of my friends are, or Agile really was just a stupid idea to begin with. After many years of agony, Cliff Berg, a major evangelist of this idiocy, finally admitted Agile’s failure.
Untold millions of dollars and other currencies have been wasted on the idea of Agile, and its ugly bastard kid, Scrum. Countless untalented, dumb persons found safe jobs at large corporations, where they merely parroted buzzwords and played with meaningless cards and colorful charts all day. Insane amounts of hours have been sunk into endless meetings. An entire generation of software engineers gave up the profession because they found themselves struggling in the mud instead of soaring in the skies (I have my poetic cap on). Yet today, here’s what appeared on LinkedIn:
Aw, how cute. Where have I seen this kind of argument before? “No, our system isn’t wrong, it’s the circumstances!” “It failed because nobody followed the instructions!” “The system is perfect, it’s the people who got it wrong!”
Oh yes, I remember. This is where I heard it.
Seriously Cliff, please do what Elon Musk suggested to Bob Iger. No amount of mental gymnastics, no amount of hocus pocus and no fancy academy will ever replace competence.
Hopefully the world isn’t stupid enough to fall for your revolutionary ideas ever again, and “Agile 2” is going to be the nothingburger of the decade. As for software development standards and methods, we must go back to the 1990s, and begin with a simple but firm rule:
“At some point, a project must produce a final product.”
If this isn’t the team’s goal, then it’s not a real project. This was the first thing managers seemed to forget under the spell of your “Agile” baloney.
