Anonymous wrote:people who drank the “agile” kool-aid cannot be saved. best to just ignore them and focus on getting things done…

on my first job out of school i built tax software using Fortran on IBM 370 mainframes.

our managers were technical , and the company had developed a system in which, regression tests ran every night on code that was checked in. for each days changes, they were put on a virtual disk and that disk was moved forward in the rotation, so that after a week, the code would automatically be deployed to Production.

it was agile but never called that.

the concepts of ...

- small incremental development over waterfall development
- automate regression tests and deployment scripts
- constant incremental deployments to production

are sound and good, no matter what they are called.

the problem with Agile is a lot of non-technical MBA types got involved and forgot the core values because they never developed a single line of code.

people who drank the “agile” kool-aid cannot be saved. best to just ignore them and focus on getting things done…

Anonymous wrote:So-called "Agile" is a mess in our experience. It was clever marketing and an attempt to claim that process is more important than hiring people with strong design & coding skills.

Our experience is that lightweight good processes (i.e., not the mess called Agile) can help great programmers perform more effectively, but there are no magic processes which will enable marginal programmers to perform visibly better.

+1 million. Oh the irony - so-called agile is one of least agile approaches…