Managers everywhere: “Okay team, recent research has shown that agile has serious flaws, so we’ll switch to Scrum.”

When people talk about Agile, they’re referring to one of two things: the manifesto, or the popular “agile” process.

Problem is: the popular process breaks a lot of the manifesto’s principles. The concept of “sprints” goes directly against the manifesto’s call to a sustainable pace. And in practice, the popular process tends to be documentation- and beurocracy-heavy.

This article is drawing some unsubstantiated conclusions from a very small sample size, and they don’t seem to consider many other explanations. For example, it may be that companies are more likely to use an agile methodology when they’re expecting changing requirements or limited input, so it makes sense they’d have a higher failure rate. Correlation != causation.

The article only touched on the real issue: companies that employ agile (especially the largely-ineffective popular process) are often the types that use it as an excuse to skimp on other areas. Agile or not, any project without clear direction and some documentation up front is going to struggle (and the manifesto’s emphasis on working software over documentation wasn’t referring to high-level requirements).

Overall, 2/10 article.

I wonder how failure is defined (maybe it’s in the article). Because SW companies don’t really care about making SW work, the only measure of success is selling SW teams to bullshit customers for as long as possible.

Oh wow so this “impact engineering” methodology seems like it could be interesting, let me just look it up.

Hmm.

Odd the only results are this article and articles like it based on a press release for a book that is seemingly the only source of any information on this methodology.

Oh <insert Willem Defoe tapping forehand meme> it was click bait all along.

Software engineering firms continuously learning the hard way the lessons of old from conventional engineering.