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Comment by junon | Hacker News Reader

Describing agile as a cult is spot-on. Regardless of its intent, I've never seen nor heard of it being implemented in a way that promotes iterative R&D on a development team.

Agile is more suited toward software maintenance IMO, not building new software. Rarely are senior engineers looking for the former.

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> Agile is more suited toward software maintenance IMO, not building new software.

One other learning that I've taken from big-A Agile is that it is only suited for teams where everybody is a "generalist" within the team. By "generalist" I mean that any developer on the team can work on any issue within that team's purview.

If your team is responsible for any component where only a subset of the team has the specialization to work on it, team-wide sprint planning actually hinders progress.

In the "agile" environments I've seen, devs are expected to be the ultimate generalist. We have to do planning, documentation, testing, qa, ops, and still write the code.

Personally I don't see that as a bad thing. I care more about ownership, I'd much rather be responsible for a project instead of just tickets.

That philosophy preaches that any person can fulfill any task equally well, which isn't true. QA and ops are distinct skill sets, very different from what's needed to be a good developer. If I'm doing all that other stuff, when does the code get written? By who?

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