Can You Hear the Pain?
I stumbled onto this page yesterday. It is “a curated list of negative developer comments about Agile and Scrum on social media.” So much pain is being expressed in the industry right now! Read a few (a small sampling of the total document) that I have quoted below. Can you hear the frustration?
…i know for a fact that 90% of engineers dislike agile but many don't even imagine there can be an alternative…
Agile was supposed to free us from operational dogma but instead it, much like Anakin Skywalker, became the very thing it was supposed to destroy.
Agile=='Go Cut me the Switch to beat you with
…and it seems particularly susceptible to coercion.
…you feel you shouldn't even try something difficult because you can't break down into little daily chunks…
… Every single project that attempts scrum ends up burning people out eventually.
Scrum is basically a huge amplifier for crappy management, and offers absolutely no protections against it.
… Devs hate agile since there are all these random goals that must be met by an arbitrary deadline…
Every time a Scrum project goes badly, any criticism attributed to Scrum is deflected with this no true scottsman argument…
The real reason programmers hate agile: we like our autonomy. We want to diagnose and fix problems, not be micromanaged…
…I’ve never personally seen or heard second hand of a successful scrum implementation, and the SWE academic literature doesn’t support it either…
I have yet to see an implementation of Agile that's not misused as a pretext for micromanagement.
In the worst cases, [agile] puts extreme pressure on the people doing the actual development work…
Waterfall is like heaven compared to Agile…
It goes on and on.
And I suspect this document is just the tip of the iceberg of what is out there on the internet.
When will the evidence be sufficient for change? If the development process is not working for developers, it doesn’t matter what else it is trying to accomplish — it is not a good process.
I'm the guy who curates/maintains Agile In Their Own Words (AITOW).
I started it because at every agile/scrum project after agile/scrum project, I found that development on a technical level went very wrong in the same way over and over again. Predictably. I wanted to write the mother of all essays about why this was , but I couldn't quite put my finger on it (it turns out a lot of agile/scrum dysfuctionality is caused by subtle, 2nd order effects). So I hunted down what hundreds and hundreds of developers said in hundreds of hundreds of social media comments about why agile/scrum was messed things up, and wrote down the very best, most articulate examples that were given in the hopes of someday using it as research for the essay. Many people say "agile sucks"; few people do the work of precisely defining why.
In general, it's hard to find negative comments about agile/scrum because propaganda and fears of retaliation. It's even harder to find negative comments about agile/scrum dysrupts software development on a real-work, on-the-ground technical level.
For example, comments on agile disincentivizing necessary work on LAND (Large Atomic Non-Deliverable) requirements, and the friction LAND's cause between devs and PO's/scrum masters are surprisingly rare, even if the problem is a universal constant on every agile/scrum project I've ever been on. There's other problems, such as stakeholders wanting a detailed daily update and the dev being put into the awkward position of saying they've only read documentation.
Many of the points made in your "Scrum Dad" posts are another example of technical problems agile/scrum causes that don't usually make it past discussions that only touch on agile/scrum as an abstraction layer.
While the entire document is a long read, I'd recommend the reader do it in all the way through in one sitting; they'll notice repeating trends that are often not talked about. The nice thing about using other people's comments is that when someone says "that's just your opinion", you can point them to AITOW and say "it's not just me".
This hits so close to me... for years I felt Scrum/Agile and its twisted variants were actually making devs lives miserable. I even wrote a recopilation of articles and some thoughs on the problems with how Agile-like workflows are implemented in companies (https://failingup.substack.com/p/notes-on-the-corruption-of-agile).
My conclussion is that, in almost every case, it is a disguise for managers to do micromanage the team and to have an excuse for it: "guys, this is how Agile works, we have to follow the sprints and the ceremonies so we can be agile and faster and better!"
P.S.: I hope you don't mind me sharing that post, if so, please remove the link :)