Agile does not really works. It sometimes works, exceptionally, usually the more you try to do the by the book agile the worst it gets. Every single time they make agile reform, everything stats to suck and everything turns into ritualized micro management.
I'm all for criticizing agile etc if it doesn't work, but this is such a generic complaint.
What's "by the book" agile? Scrum? The things in the manifesto? Something that some rando Scrummaster said?
And who is micromanaging? Both the Agile Manifesto and Scrum are about "self-organizing" teams. If someone is micromanaging, how is that self-organizing?
It is generic, because it is the most common result of agile.
> What's "by the book" agile? Scrum? The things in the manifesto?
Definitely scrum.
> And who is micromanaging? Both the Agile Manifesto and Scrum are about "self-organizing" teams. If someone is micromanaging, how is that self-organizing?
Every single detail and aspect of your work is determined by someone or something else. You have zero individual autonomy, zero individual responsibility. And zero option to do something good or bad. "Self-organizing" just means that scrum master or coach or whoever is creating set of rules that dictate pretty much every aspect of work.
Yeah, it is not one person telling you how to do things. It is that every aspect of work is decided by someone else or some committee. When you have one person telling you how to do things you at least can adjust to them and negotiate some space with them.
> "Self-organizing" just means that scrum master or coach or whoever is creating set of rules that dictate pretty much every aspect of work.
See, this is already not "by the book" Scrum.
The team decides those things in a retrospective, and as long as they are releasing in a reasonable timely manner, it's alright.
If someone is being unreasonable and putting their foot down too much, then it's a management issue that doesn't have anything to do with Scrum. Either the person is a dictator, or they don't have authority and there's no management to put an end to it.
Scrum also doesn't work when the team is burning in a building on fire, but we don't blame Scrum for that.
I'm all for shitting on it, but those problems have been happening in companies for millenia. Scrum won't fix them, you gotta fix each separate problem by itself.
Three of the original signers of the Agile Manifesto are also the main people involved with creating XP[1][2][3].
The Agile Manifesto was just a bunch of people who were already doing XP, Scrum or some other lightweight process getting together and writing down the similarities between what they were doing. It's a blanket term invented to describe a variety of different processes, not an actual process.
