Agile is like communism - it sounds like a great idea. Except it never seems to work anywhere, and everywhere that it turns into a train wreck consisting of 45 minute daily stand-ups and 3 hour meetings arguing about T-shirt sizes or whether points are equivalent to time or not, the only explanation anyone ever proffers is, "well, you weren't doing Agile right".

No fucking shit. Nobody can do Agile right. I would argue that if something is so hard to get right, then it is effectively worthless.

The people who “do agile right” are out there. Just, like the agile manifesto says, they’re authoring their own processes. And because of that, they don’t have to call it agile - or really call it anything. They just go into work, figure out what needs doing, and take responsibility and do it.

I’ve worked in plenty of teams that did this sort of thing. All different. And at different scales - startups to big tech to game jams.

Agile works very well for small projects. When you have less than 10 developers it gets rid of a lot of overhead. However those are situations where project management isn't really hard and so they didn't need it. Companies doing projects with hundreds of thousands of developers are hurting because nobody can do project management. Agile seemed to help and so they jumped in. However painful experience with agile has shown there really was a good reason for all those processes agile go rid of! They are back to waterfall because at the end of the day they have real problems and all solutions end up pushing them to do a lot of pre-work planning to have a chance. Not that waterfall is good - it isn't - but everything else is worse as painful experience keeps showing.

Note that while we call what they are doing waterfall, in fact it isn't. All (nearly all?) projects are doing releases. They do go back and change things made in the past, just that the timeline is very long. They do discover things are not working and stop - sometimes they don't realize this in time to stop early, but they do stop.

What the world needs is a process for large numbers of people to develop software without stepping on each other. I do not have an answer to this problem - I'm not even sure if it exists.

Nobody can do Agile right because there's no one-size fits-all process. There are Agile approaches you can use and see if they work for your team.

The motto is "individuals and interactions over processes and tools" because if a process or tool isn't working for you, you're not supposed to use it.

It's like communism in the sense that it's defined with all the good quantities you'd want in a society or workforce and has several conflicting methods to get there. It's a set of principles that invites people to argue about how their approaches fit into them. Maybe that's the point.

My team spends half an hour per week on standups and about 2 hours every 3 weeks pointing stories. Any interaction beyond that is on an as-needed basis and mostly I'm just trusted to figure out what needs doing and do it. Agile is like communism - problematic, but mostly maligned by people who don't understand it using examples that are either made up whole-cloth or cherry-picked and then badly distorted in the retelling.

Yeah, kind of disagree with this. Compared to waterfall, agile is definitely an improvement.

And most teams get the core ideas right in my opinion: small, tight knit teams working closely together, with a "reduced amount" of process (yeah, think the number of meetings in agile is bad, in waterfall, meetings seem like crush you like a tsunami).

it's a lot less like communism and much more like a co-op or member-owned/lead organization - which can and totally do work. Think a bunch of farmers banding together to start a credit union vs. a big centrally planned org.

Bullshit. That's like claiming no one can play good football because the Cleveland Browns suck.

https://ronjeffries.com/xprog/articles/jatbaseball/

Agile is like communism. Lots of people like to hang external ideas to it. Some valid, some not.

Points, t-shirt sizes, figmas, etc... these are _tools_ and _processes_. Why the hell are you complaining about it when it says very clearly that you should focus on people and interactions?