Agile is Rubbish-Based Software Development, by Thomas Hansen

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/thomas-hansen-ainiro_agile-rubbish-based-software-development-activity-7268900310926962688-Q4SO

The Agile manifesto was like a revelation of Truth when it came out 25 years ago. Finally, after 50 years of bureaucracy and "committee-based software development", we were unleashed to do what we do best; Create software!

Today Agile is the laughing stock of the software development industry. To understand why, realise that on average it takes me 5 days to have a one liner change applied to production, but only 5 seconds to create the change.

First we have to have a grooming session, where typically 15 people spend 15 minutes each on arguing if it's a "worthy change". Then the PM adds it into his backlog and assigns it to a sprint. At some point a dev head picks up the ticket, and spends a couple of hours on TDD. Without even having applied a single change related to what needs to be done, we've spent a total of 5 hours on the frikkin' thing so far.

The dev head spends 5 seconds fixing the issue, creates a branch and a pull request. Now 2 additional dev heads needs to spend 15 minutes reading the dude's code, interrupting them in their own work. Research shows that if you bother a developer for 5 minutes, you will lose 40 minutes of productivity. Catching! 80 more minutes wasted!

Then the pull request is approved, and a notification goes to the original dev head who created the change in the first place. Since everybody refuses to actually merge other dev heads' pull requests, the task of clicking the button to actually merge the frikkin' thing goes back to the original dev head. Catching! Another 40 minutes wasted, since the original dev head had now moved on to another task and was interrupted by the acceptance notification.

Finally! The change is now in the development environment! At which point it of course breaks everything. Not because there's actually something wrong with the code, but simple because the unit tests are created for indeterministic code, and some database server was overloaded and couldn't respond to the dev server in a timely fashion, or some DNS entry was updated resulting in a unit test for an integration towards a 3rd party didn't work.

A post mortem is created, and 15 devs heads now spends the weekend trying to figure out how to fix the problem with their dev server, which cannot be fixed, because it's a problem of having unit tests testing indeterministic code, and therefore due to the laws of the universe simply will fail in 50% of the runs regardless of what they do "because of math and statistics."

Add 5 additional days to have the QA team check your code, at which point they will report 15 unrelated bugs to you that has nothing to do with your code changes, making you having to run around like a headless chicken in the office trying to figure out "who the f*ck did this thing?" Since your code is now being blamed for it because of a failing QA process.

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