Agile as Trauma

Re:Agile as Trauma by corpMaverick on Saturday October 16, 2021 @08:34PM (#28892907)

Agile is much more than Scrum. There many different ways to do Agile. Just as an example Scott McConnell has a great book called Rapid Application Development (1996) where he documents many best practices and approaches that are essentially Agile, but that book predates the signing of "The Agile Manifesto"(2001). One of the practices is that you should carefully select the project life cycle model. Among the options that are documented in the book:

  - Pure Waterfall
  - Code-and-Fix.
  - Spiral.
  - Modified Waterfalls.
  - Staged Delivery.
  - Design-to-Schedule.
  - Evolutionary Delivery.
  - Design-to-Tools.
  - Commercial Off-the-Shelf Software.

McConnell gives you enough information to help you make a choice. On the other hand Scrum tells you to treat every project the same way and most people do not know why things are done in certain way. They just parrot the same phrases they heard in their two weeks Scrum training and typically the Scrum Master knows nothing about software development him/her self.

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Re:Agile as Trauma by steveBK123 on Saturday October 16, 2021 @08:54PM (#28893020)

Thanks for the reference, this will make for some interesting reading.

Agreed, I think the problem is the agile industrial complex has settled on scrum training, so when your CTO buys into agile, that is what you get. The consultants and training programs are all the same orthodoxy. Further, whatever flavor they decide on at the top ends up being applied to a wide range of teams below, which otherwise would naturally have different project life cycle models...

A firm I was at not only had agile scrum firm-wide, but mandated we all have same length sprints ending on the same day of the week. This way we would all be "aligned". Also it meant it was impossible to book a conference room as they were 200% subscribed on sprintmas day by all teams... After 6 months they at least decided we could at least start/end on different days.

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