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Comment by MBCook | Hacker News Reader

Agile is extremely popular for a reason. Whatever developers think it promises a way to wrangle complexity (breaking things down), adapt on the fly better than waterfall, and provide estimates so the business can plan better.

Even if your company does it horribly wrong management is going to want those three things still. They won’t agree to take it away.

You have to offer them something with the same (or more) benefits that works better.

And “trust us we know what we’re doing” doesn’t tend to cut it.

So I think we’re stuck with it for a long time, for better or worse.

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You're right. Agile was never for the developers, it's for the business. Developers complaining about Agile is like kids complaining about their homework - it's to be expected.

That said I've seen enough Agile projects flounder and fail to know that it's no silver bullet. Like homework, there is little indication that it actually fulfills its purpose.

Whatever snake oil comes next is only going to gain adoption if it promises even more control for the business.

Compared to the previous process, often just waterfall plus total guesses, I actually see it as a real improvement.

But people have to buy-in/trust it and do a half decent job. In my experience that’s not really what happens.

Even half-assed agile (if that) at one place I’ve been was a real improvement, though not as much as it could have been. There was a clear difference in the teams that failed/refused to embrace it to those who tried.

Agile was invented by developers for developers. For professionals, not people who want to be academics but get paid by a corpo.

Most software at the end of the day is the same as hammering nails.

Anyone who builds anything needs a process and accountability.

Agreed. But the old system of “well this is really big so 9 months to two years maybe? We’ll be over there trying to finish it” isn’t nearly as appealing. How far along are we? “I don’t know 27%?”

But “here’s 20 steps averaging X points so it will take Y long and we can easily track progress” that agile promises is much more appealing. It may not speed up good teams. Or bad teams. It may slow things down some.

But managers like it.

Unfortunately, most teams wrongly estimate their time requirements and the last 10% is really more like 90% of the development time.

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