I've belonged to numerous teams that followed some form of agile, to varying degrees of success (or failure).

The shape of what Agile meant in each of those teams was very different from one another. It would be disingenuous to say "the ones that succeeded were truer to Agile".

If Agile can be summarized as "employ tighter feedback loops", the whole Agile thing was beyond useless. A single sentence, as useful a tenet as it may be, does not a philosophy make. And this idea was not even new by the time the Agile manifesto came out (as explained in the linked blog post).

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SAI_Peregrinus 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

> If Agile can be summarized as "employ tighter feedback loops", the whole Agile thing was beyond useless.

Not just that, Royce's original paper that coined the term "waterfall" in 1970[1] can be summarized as "employ tighter feedback loops" compared to top-down design (figures 2-4 in the paper).

[1] https://www.praxisframework.org/files/royce1970.pdf

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latentsea 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Useless as it might seem, I really do think it is actually that basic. Is it useless? Hardly. Take out feedback loops and see what happens.

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surgical_fire 2 days ago | parent [-]

The tenet was not useless. But it was not bought forth by Agile. It already existed.

And if this tenet is all Agile is, then it contained zero new ideas or contributions.

	▲	latentsea 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		It seems to have successfully popularized it though.