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Comment by sul_tasto | Hacker News Reader

In my experience, management cherry pick aspects of the agile method that disempower knowledge workers and destroy any sense of ownership over the product, while ignoring all practices and intentions of empowering knowledge workers. Until the Agile custodians address how their philosophy has been corrupted in the real world, I want nothing else to do with it.

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Agile in practice is like conveyor belt mass production but with each produced piece having unique requirements from each worker. Managers love it, the conveyor belt is constantly moving so a worker can't look at any piece for too long, so throughput is steady and the team always looks very productive!

Edit: And then some will say "If you are stressed, why don't you just reduce the speed of the conveyor belt? Agile is meant to be customized!", or "If an item wasn't done properly you can just move it back to the start of the belt so you can look at it again!". My answer is "I just don't want that damn conveyor belt in the first place!".

Two things:

1. I suspect you're ascribing a level of power to "the Agile custodians" (who, exactly?) that doesn't exist. Nobody has the power to prevent people from misinterpreting Agile, no matter how much as they might want to.

2. The first chapter of my book (the one under discussion) does discuss how the philosophy has been corrupted in the real world. It's a major theme of the book.

The first chapter is online for free at present: https://www.jamesshore.com/v2/books/aoad2/what_is_agile

I think it’s fair to consider companies offering Agile training and certifications to be custodians of the Agile philosophy. Our team was sent to a week long SAFe Agilist certification course. Our management was notably absent.

I think Agile fails because the manifesto says nothing about management’s role other than “business people and developers will work together.” It’s no surprise then that management fills their version of their role to be whatever they want- usually to the detriment of the developers and the core Agile principles.

> I think it’s fair to consider companies offering Agile training and certifications to be custodians of the Agile philosophy.

God no. There’s some good training out there, but a whole lot more bottom feeders. I include all the certification mills in that category. Certifications are a racket.

> Our team was sent to a week long SAFe Agilist certification course. Our management was notably absent.

Par for the course, sadly.

> I think Agile fails because the manifesto says nothing more about management’s role other than “business people and developers will work together.”

Agile’s a big tent and a lot of people have written about agile management. Johanna Rothman is particularly prolific. (I have a few things to say about it in my book, too.) If managers aren’t learning about Agile management, it’s because they’re not looking, not because the information isn’t out there. Although I think part of the reason they’re not looking is because Scrum was so successful, and Scrum is fairly anti-management, or at least has nothing to say about it.

(Scrum’s success has been both a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, Agile probably wouldn’t be on everyone’s lips today if XP was still carrying the torch. On the other hand, Scrum’s surface simplicity and cash-grabbing certification scheme opened the door to some truly awful training.)

Yep. I have done it well but I have also experienced exactly as your comment describes. In those scenarios, some poor tech lead is appointed whose responsibilities include estimation, knowing the whole backlog, managing tech debt, managing risks and hiring for the team (instead of an empowered team doing all this)

I don’t follow. If your managers have disempowered you, it’s not the “agile custodians” fault, nor is it Agile, it’s your management’s fault and you should want nothing else to do with them instead

That or invent something better that management cannot infect

I agree that it was the management’s fault, and that’s a large part of why I moved on.

I just would also like to suggest that my experience on that team is not unique. I think that more companies might be successful in implementing Agile if the relationship between management and the development team was more clearly defined; and if the managerial role was more clearly defined (to include constraints on managerial roles). Empowering knowledge workers requires managers to relinquish some of their oversight and authority, by definition. I don’t think Agile training or the manifesto makes this explicit enough.

The problem with any development philosophy or dogma at this point is, that it will eventually be led by people that want to make money from it trough books, consultancies, certificates, etc. People that are willing brush over any downsides or compromise its original ideas in whatever way necessary to sell.

We could replace agile with something else and it will end up the same way.

We already have all the agile consultants have rebranded themselves "DevOps" consultants, or even better at this point "DevSecOps" all well ignoring completely everything DevOps is supposed to be about.

These false priests of technology substitute their tools for their lack of understanding and ignore completely that just having a pipeline and doesn't mean you are doing DevOps.

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