I find some kind of Agile is potentially a pleasant way of handling development work. I have a couple of serious reservations in practice:
1. Part of the charm of Agile is that the devs set their own workload. That sounds empowering, but they can become like their own hyper-tyrannical manager, setting themselves unachievable workloads; that is, they become a proxy for bad management.
2. Managers can easily screw it up. For example, by wedging all projects into the same daily scrum, which then drags on for an hour; by participating in the scrum AT ALL, if they aren't doing dev work (they're supposed to be observers); by changing tasks mid-sprint, etc.
TBH I think the term 'agile' should be shunned. It's become a marketing buzzword, and has almost completely detached itself from the Agile Manifesto. If I were farming-out some dev work, and the proposal included something like "We use agile methodologies", that would raise a red flag for me.
1. Part of the charm of Agile is that the devs set their own workload. That sounds empowering, but they can become like their own hyper-tyrannical manager, setting themselves unachievable workloads; that is, they become a proxy for bad management.
2. Managers can easily screw it up. For example, by wedging all projects into the same daily scrum, which then drags on for an hour; by participating in the scrum AT ALL, if they aren't doing dev work (they're supposed to be observers); by changing tasks mid-sprint, etc.
TBH I think the term 'agile' should be shunned. It's become a marketing buzzword, and has almost completely detached itself from the Agile Manifesto. If I were farming-out some dev work, and the proposal included something like "We use agile methodologies", that would raise a red flag for me.