I am so sorry to everybody here who never saw the real agile. Yours was likely just wasabi scrum.
this post was submitted on 10 Jun 2025
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The Cult Of Agile with its Holy Practices that Must Be Done without actual logical and well thought about reasons (instead, the reason are things like "It's What It Says In This Agile Holy Book" and/or "That's What I Saw Other Agile People Do"), is not at all the same as the class of Software Development Processes called Agile.
Then again, Software Development Processes are the kind of thing you tackle at the level of Technical Architect, and since there aren't really that many genuine Technical Architects (with the actual chops, rather than merelly 5-10 years experience in a single kind of development environment and a title obtained from a company that gives fancy titles as "promotion" instead of a proper salary raise) around, Agile is mostly just blindly followed without true understanding of what it does, what it doesn't do, how that is does it or why it cannot do it, and thus were and how it actually adds value and were it doesn't.
The only people who saw the real agile were people in a ski resort. Every company says they do agile now but favors processes and tools over individuals and interactions.
(The ski resort comment is because I believe the people that wrote the manifesto were at a ski lodge when they did.)
More realistic versions:
Waterfall: the car is "finished" at the end, but replace the engine with a huge roaring fire. The Dev team continues to put the engine fire out and build the engine for 3x the original project duration.
Agile: replace the cute scooter and bicycle with the partial car graphics from Waterfall, but mount a uniccyle seat and then a park bench on top of the partially built car.
AI: the whole thing should always be on fire, and have several spies from different countries taking pictures of it constantly.
In my experience the waterfall one would be either be "a bicycle that was partly transformed into a monster truck when they figured out it needed to carry a lot more load, but kept some bicycle parts" or "a drag car were they installed an engine far too large for the body so it has no hood and the engine is partly out of the car, and yet the car is supposed to be used as a normal city car".
Add to waterfall that the dev team is replaced by a different team from India who don't speak the same language and are abysmally motivated by abysmal pay. The old devs didn't even leave the keys for the car, and the new ones are perfectly fine with just letting the engine fire exist because it was not in the management spec to put it out.
Their solution was mounting the semi-built old car on top of a new car.
This is unrealistic, agile stages aren't missing unusual pieces that aren't quite critical but probably should be there anyway.
What’s not shown is that the car doesn’t have an engine. Management was really eager to release it to the customer. Don’t worry, it’s planned to get fixed later (spoiler: it’s never going to get fixed).
We delivered the car to spec. We have a hamster on a spinning wheel in the engine block now. You can upgrade the engine as part of our enhancement package, which costs an order of magnitude more money for a linear scale in performance.
I'd like to think that hamster wheel to V12 isn't on a linear scale in terms of step-wise upgrades, but you're right that there's no guarantee that they wont just swap in a larger hamster.
At some point going as far as trying to genetically engineer an even larger hamster instead of just changing the design so that it could use multiple smaller but parallel hamsters
they could invest in hamster-breeder reactor engine, which with enough money injection could create an endless supply of hamsters on wheels competing only for space and attention
In fact, maybe we should run offices like that. Just breed developers in a closed system
I can't wait for hamster wheel version 12! So much more range than v1
No no of course not, please feel free to try our new "12 hamsters chained together" package
First thing I remember, was asking Scrum Master "Why"?
For there were many things I didn't know
And Scrummy always smiled, took me by the hand
Saying, "Someday you'll understand"
Well I'm here to tell you now, each and every scrum,
You'd better learn it fast, you'd better learn it young
'Cause tech debt sprint never comes
The time and tears went by, and I collected story points
For there were many things I didn't know
When Scrummy went away, he said "Try to be a PM
And someday you'll understand"
Well I'm here to tell you now, each and every scrum,
You'd better learn it fast, you'd better learn it young
'Cause tech debt sprint never comes
And then, one day in April, I wasn't even there
For there were many things I didn't know
An intern was given to me, Scrummy held his hand,
Saying "Someday you'll understand"
Well I'm here to tell you now, each and every scrum
You'd better learn it fast, you'd better learn it young
'Cause tech debt sprint never comes
Ooh, tech debt sprint never comes.
Think it was September, the year I went away
For there were many things I didn't know
And I still see him standin', tryin' to be a PM
I said, "Someday you'll understand"
Well here I am to tell you, each and every scrum
You'd better learn it fast, you'd better learn it young
'Cause tech debt sprint never comes.
Ooh, tech debt sprint never comes.
Haha, well done.
Mm, yes. Such a wise pancake.
we’ll just launch the login feature this month and put out signup next cycle
I think this should show internals of the car and have them all have a finished car but agile is like 50% zipties and AI is just a bunch of wheels and screws in a car shaped contianer.
AI is just a bunch of wheels and screws in a car shaped contianer
At this point, just put the Cybertruck at the end
Nice
Agile and AI rows look terribly optimistic.
In my experience, Agile you get skateboard wheels. Then you get one pair of skateboard wheels on a bike frame (no handles, wheels, seat, or pedals). Then you get a skateboard next to a bike without wheels, then you get a car with no doors, no transmission, no engine, and no gas tank, a bike with flat tires, a broken skateboard. Next you have a car engine in the car, and windows (but no doors), a duct taped skateboard, but the bike has air in the tires, but the chain is now missing, and one pedal fell off. Then you get a good portion of the car, except you forgot to account for an accelerator or brakes, you now have a bike that works though, except with only one pedal.
Finally you just end up putting the bike inside the car and it works almost Flintstone style. But you also have a new skateboard that is in pretty good shape.
The real flaw in the diagram is that all the intermediate steps of Agile are usable products. All 5 of those are completed, sellable products. Agile pivots way before any of these become usable.
The skateboard would literally be a plank on top of some wheel axes pinched from a shopping cart, the scooter would just be a flimsy pole stuck through a hole in the "skateboard", the bicycle would be 2 such poles, one with a small piece of wood as a seat and at the front the wheel axis had been moved to be soldered to the front pole so that one rotates with the other.
All of them function only in the technical sense, are awkward to use, don't last long under continuous use and look like shit because they were not done with the right techniques for resilience and have none of the finishing touches needed for ease of use and attractiveness.
Besides, the waterfall style is that you get the perfect car... eventually... or rather, tomorrow, tomorrow you read this again and check if it's the day you'll get your car.
And when the car is drivable you do a demo for the customer to show what it'll look like, somebody in the room will ask what the flight ceiling is and things first go very quiet and then very loud. After much discussion it turns out they actually need a flying car. Of course there is no additional budget for that.
somebody in the room will ask what the flight ceiling is
Sir, this is a Wendy's
Yes. The waterfall version should just leave off the completed car.
Functional: car, but without moving parts.
Marketing problem. Call it no maintenance.
Agile is the third row.
AI: a cool-looking car, but it’s papier-mache, and falls apart when subjected to any physical forces.