> corporate watering down of Agile concepts

I think inverting agile concepts is more accurate.

It's very common. When I was working at a USAF base they decided to adopt Lean. What they actually implemented was almost the exact opposite of Lean in every way, almost comically so.

A key element of Lean is empowering the workers to improve the processes. Let them come up with ideas that improve things and run experiments (guided by management perhaps, but not directed by). But the way USAF did it, the managers would watch a process being done, identify "wasted" movement, and then rewrite the process/procedures to eliminate that wasted movement. It was clearly just Scientific Management but being called Lean because they "leaned out" the processes. Naturally, the actual workers did not like coming in every other week and having to learn their job all over again. After a while they still held "Lean Events" but by then it was for show rather than to actually effect change in how things were done.

I once interviewed at a place that told me they did "design sprints", "coding sprints", "integration sprints", and "testing sprints"

Corporate agile looks from a distance like waterfall in a dress if you get my drift.

Once the scrum "masters" start becoming unspoken management, then you know the process has got off the rails and is no longer agile.

Sometimes it makes sense, corps don't actually have any need to churn out new features, at that point you just have kanban, or even waterfall. Be nice to stop pretending, though.

Agile is a lot like Communism: there's a lot of people who swear it works great but everywhere it seems to have been tried it hasn't gone well... And the apologists just insist "those places didn't understand it and do it right".

There's a bias there, I think there are a lot of small shops where agile works great and you mostly hear about big shops that use it where it will never work great because you probably don't care that much about SmallTechCo.

Versus communism where people (e.g. Benjamin Tucker) were predicting its primary failure mode decades before it ever was instantiated at any scale.

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Excellent points.

Process is not the problem.

People are the problem.

What I mostly see it is people doing it to themselves. Someone thinks he has to be guardian of the process and refuses to let the experiment run.

I worked at a big company which did a full agile transformation, including full-time, agile coaches. I imagine everyone hired afterwords hated agile for the very real swirl the process caused, but those of us who’d been there before know it was FAR better than that chaos.

I also worked at a funded start up that implemented agile from the beginning, worked pretty great.

I've seen agile working well at a fairly big company.

I don't understand this recent pushback against agile development.

Do you really want to go back to the waterfall and V model style of development? Those are basically guaranteed failures in a fast moving industry like software development. If anything your comparison should be applied to the waterfall/V model because it is essentially central planning.

If you are doing things like building MVPs, iterated/incremental development with frequent changes and deployments to production then you are doing agile development.

Maybe it is not hyper formalized like Scrum but it is agile nevertheless.

I mean we should get used to this kind of stuff and just accept that Agile means "corporate agile" and just call classical agile that. Just like how OOP today means "like c++" and not whatever smalltalk is.