Libertad, libertad!

[jw944]

Agile is a lot like Communism - it disincentivizes hard work, ignores peoples' motivation, marginalizes high performers, pretends everyone is the same, and calls itself a "revolution" in spite of being forced on its participants. But it's great in theory.

Comments

[kizayaen]

Nobody ever was able to convince me authoritatively that it was great even in theory. I can't make it sound to my ears like anything other than purpose-written justification for scope and requirement creep.

[jw944]

Sorry I didn't reply to this earlier.

I think what lacks justification is not feature or scope creep (these are, after all, generally paid for), but our insistence on the transactional nature of projects. I'm at least as guilty of this as anyone else, but I think it's one place where programmers' tendency toward being prima donnas (or otherwise having an artistic temperament) is really troublesome. I can't, in spite of my preferences and behavior, justify the idea that requirements shouldn't change over the course of the project.

I haven't dropped my gavel on Agile entirely, but I do think that implementing a democratic, egalitarian, or otherwise "fair" system in an authoritarian way is equivalent to asserting failure as a requirement.

[kizayaen]

No, I agree that there should be some flexibility for changing requirements, if for no other reason than that customers rarely know what they want. My opinion though is that agile methodology actively encourages a managerial point of view which starts generating changes at a pace that essentially means development teams are frantically trying to catch up to a constantly moving target.

It could very well be that my experiences are non-representative of the industry as a whole, and that this is less of a problem in the "real world" than I believe it to be.