When agile first started it was developer centric and brought in the ideas of continuous improvement, inspect and adapt, eliminating waste (handoffs, extra communication etc). One of the core ideas was to look at what was working/not working - if it's not working you drop it. Then we got the scrum cult. Ironically it has led to a huge amount of wasted time and effort, as well as stressed devs. In a lot of cases these extra processes get added by well meaning people who don't look at the whole system of work. If you can't drop what is not working then it's not agile.
When I was younger I wondered what all these other people in the business did with their time. Surely it was all about the code and all these other corporate drones just needed to respect that. Then I guess I started moving over to the dark side and got a bit more empathy for the real jobs that other people have to do - so devs don't have to spend ALL their time talking to customers, paying the bills, handling the marketing etc. Strangely many of these people, even customers, were curious about likely dates for shipping the work. Turned out their jobs depended on it too. I recently interviewed an engineer working at a startup run by engineers. There is no management, which he thought he'd like. Instead they use commitment. After 18 months of very long hours and weekends guess why he wanted to move on? Organizing the work and the people is an art, lots of people get it wrong even when they try hard to get it right - but these articles? I hope my competition is reading them.
