My favorite Twitter right now is Agile Thought Leaders telling us how the vague and unsubstantiated tenets of agile are being misinterpreted by literally every practitioner and it’s somehow our fault they can’t clearly communicate.

When they said “no big design up front” and we stopped doing design at all, why were they surprised? When they say to use story points and velocity and we start converting those to hours/days and measuring productivity, why are they surprised?

When they say “Don’t Repeat Yourself” and we define ZERO = 0, why are they surprised? When they say “simplest thing that could possible work” and we ship shitty unobservable code, why are they surprised?

When they say “you aren’t gonna need it” and 3 years later we have a giant mess on our hands because we didn’t consider carrying costs of short term decision-making, why are they surprised?

If most people can’t do agile “correctly”, you know what, it’s not our problem. It’s the Thought Leaders’ problem of poor communication.

Cynically, though, there’s a lot of money to be made proselytizing a wonder solution, watching people fail to apply it, and coming in to tell management how fucked they are. Notice how almost all the agile dudes are consultants?

I actually don’t know how the equivalent are for DevOps, but it’s the exact same thing. “Oh, DevOps doesn’t means devs learns ops and ops learns devs, it actually means continuous delivery of value? Why the fuck did you call it “DevOps” then?!?!?”

Snarky take on SOLID for under $6 https://solid-is-not-solid.com 

I should point out that I have now worked on two systems where we applied the stuff in the agile manifesto, but that’s kinda it (no SCRUM). It works great. Frequent releases, feedback, iteration, focus on user and outcomes, that’s all great and works, at least in my experience

I have also worked on a very large and long project where we tried zero process, it didn’t work, so we added sprints and velocity. We added those to solve specific problems and they worked. Other teams used these same tools and failed. There is a LOT of nuance in how to build

The takeaway for me has been that I know my context, my domain, my problems, and someone who definitely does NOT know those things, but is being super prescriptive is not trustworthy.