alt Hacker News> I have so far not see an organisation that would be following scrum, as it is described in the scrum guide; or kanban, as it is described in the kanban guide. I have seen or heard about various organisations that use these words, but they have little resemblance to what was actually proposed.
If that's true, wouldn't it point at the process being impossible to implement?
It is a myth. There exists a version of Agile that could be implemented, and it would be the true Agile. The pure, honest experiment that would just work, because Agile cannot fail, you can only fail to Agile.
It signals to me that the process doesn't work in reality. You are better off doing something else.
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> There exists a version of Agile that could be implemented, and it would be the true Agile. The pure, honest experiment that would just work, because Agile cannot fail, you can only fail to Agile.
"Agile" is a very vague and shapeless idea which is hard to design an experiment for; but I would settle for clean experiments with well-defined methodologies/frameworks/strategies/whatever. Specifically, for scrum or kanban. Whenever people talk about these two, they seem to misunderstand them more often than not.
>It signals to me that the process doesn't work in reality. You are better off doing something else.
Whatever you do instead, you will also cargo-cult to some degree and fail equally as badly at.
For all the "You're doing it wrong!" I've seen in industry with respect to agile, I've also felt that every team I've been part of that did some version of it, seemed to function OK. I always found the "Agile Manifesto" a completely silly nothing-burger, but always understood the core tenet of 'agile' to be "employ tighter feedback loops", which... is sort of mostly how it plays out in practice??
It doesn't really fail any worse than other inflexible top-down process mandates from management.
That's where it becomes "impossible to implement"—you can't impose it as a cookie-cutter solution driven and controlled by management, and get much good out of it, yet that's the usual way it manifests in the wild. But that's not so different from anything else management might push in its place.