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.

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 administrate your servers, or debug your dns resolution issue, or backup your mail server. Now if I was at a startup, I get it, you do what the business needs you to do. But at a corporation, the Irony of saying "We are all equal, the team is all equal" is so ironic because it only works one way, no one ever writes code for me, and yet I find myself do everyone else's job. It's a system of cultural marxism.

Recently I pointed out that a particular engineer needed to do something (we'll call him Rob), literally because he had permissions / credentials.
My manager interrupted me and said... well it's not just Rob's job, "it's the teams job". The snowflake inclusion culture has hit software development / scrum, and all the developers have to move as slowly as the least competent one. I literally think Scrum was invented to destroy American productivity.

Snake Oil 100%.

Was told by a "scrum master" - if anything takes longer than 2 weeks it will never get done. Well what was Christopher Columbus thinking.

Scrum exists to deter from any great invention, to stifle the genius of any single individual, and to only apply obvious, mundane, and easy solutions to all problems.

Agile is an attempt to turn Pajeets and similar non performers into interchangeable cogs. It has the advantage of reducing the impact of developers that actually know their shit, and forcing them into the peg hole that management has prepared. Lose-lose.

The whole thing is about micromanagement, that's what it boils down to; might work great to herd newbies and less experienced developers, but it is indeed a nightmare situation for experienced devs...

I have found this blog entry from Michael O. Church to be particularly interesting on the subject.

A lot of what you're talking about has nothing to do with SCRUM or Agile. E.g. - Whether the code that a team creates is understandable and maintainable. If you don't understand why abstraction is valuable I question your understanding of development in general. I'm not saying this to belittle you but to inform others that are reading what you're writing and taking it as gospel.

SCRUM/Agile are just tools. Like any tool, they can be misused by morons and you'll end up with poor results. I've worked on teams small and large on SCRUM and waterfall projects alike and I have seen SCRUM be very successful when properly implemented.

As to your comparison contest - One person will always out-code a team if that team is composed of poor developers. Even if there are 50% rock stars and 50% idiots the team will still lose. The good devs will spend all of their time cleaning up after the bad devs. This is why some companies are extremely aggressive about hiring "the best". Bad developers aren't just slow, they are cancer. They actively hinder the rest of the team's progress.

TL;DR - If your life is crap it's because you are stuck with crap management and crap devs. Find a new place to work and pray that things are better there (spoiler: they probably won't be).

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!!!!

From my experience at the time. In the beginning was extreme programming. Take all the things that work and turn the volume to 11.

Then the corporate conslutants got involved and turned it into a train wreck.

Complexity is the problem as always. You take young devs who are scared they will be found out for not being that good and so they overengineer. Combine this with how late to the web development game most of the software companies were and you have the bloated mess we have now with web apps requiring a full GIG of Ram to run. It's insanity. 15 client-side frameworks and plenty of bloat on the server.

The problem with Agile/Scrum is that it is based on the premise that the first step to going to the moon is climbing a tree.

The problem with Waterfall is that it is based on the premise that every project is a moonshot.

If we could dump the shitty debts then we wouldn't need it.

Properly implemented AGILE is actually pretty alright. Basically, scrum boards / kanban / whatever you call it is just a fancy to-do list, and that's what any software development methodology boils down to: a to-do list to track all the shit you have to remember to do.

There's nothing wrong with having a 5-minute standup meeting (and it should only be 5 minutes) with your team at the start of the day. It's a good way to keep communication open and you'll often get quick solutions to blocking problems. It's also a good way to make sure everyone actually knows what they're going to be doing that day.

Agile was designed so that you can keep going after firing your 12th worthless H1B douchenozzle. Nothing else.

I've never even heard of AGILE/SCRUM. What is that?

Its still better than TCS's waterfall :/

Someone on my team just does whatever he wants without going through chain of command. No ticket, no documentation, nothing. Nobody ever knows what he's doing. When it came up the last time in a meeting, "Why not just create a ticket?" His response was "Well I'm sort of used to doing agile development." For him it's just code word to do whatever he wants without following any approved procedure.

I'm not a developer, an admin. Not sure if this is how it happens elsewhere.

AGILE works just fine, so do most other methodologies.

Gee, too bad in the real world people need to work together and you can't have one developer doing everything. That simple fact just discredits your whole post.