> This is the post that proves that you never used agile. And nobody you worked with ever used it. Sorry to hear that you have been scammed :(

Ah, yes, I've heard that before. I am simply not using the "proper scrum", right? And the agile coach you just happen to know can show us the way, right?

Sorry, but I've been in the industry for 15+ years, last 8 at a senior position (VP of Engineering) and I have not seen places where Agile/Scrum has contributed positively. If so many people are getting Agile and SCRUM wrong (which is a supposedly simple methodology), so much that now has to be an Agile2 version, then let's assign a lot of the blame on the methodology, shall we?

Mind you, I've seen places that were not terrible using Scrum, but it not being terrible had more to do with decent people rather than the methodology. If anything, the framework was dragging the good into the mediocre, and the mediocre and bad stayed mediocre and bad, but with less time.

> Sorry to hear that you have been scammed :(

Nope. As a matter of fact, I think it's you who has been scammed OR actively trying to scam others.

> Nope. The manager isn't even there during the standup.

That's great! The manager is not in the standup! What big level of trust displayed here! If you trust them so much, why do you think it's needed to force them every day, at a specific time, in a specific format, to say what they are doing, and what they did yesterday? We used to do that in kindergarten. If you do trust your devs, you'd encourage them to sync however they want, whenever they want, and in the format that they want and omit sync moments if they see fit.

> Nope. It gives the team a chance to see what's coming to them in the future, and a feeling to guestimate the work needed

Nope. You got it very wrong, but I see where you are coming from, your way of thinking is common in the corporate world. You are considering developer teams like a highly paid black box, who take input from the $$$ people, and convert it to features. That's why you are using the passive voice: "what's coming to them", which shows me everything I needed to know about your way of thinking.

Imagine instead a situation in which the developers actually decide what to do as a team (based on usage stats, vision, own ideas, feedback from clients), without a glorified taskmaster force feeding it to them? In that way of thinking, nothing "comes to people", they control what they work on, their own priorities and their own tasks. Too radical, right?

> and a feeling to guestimate the work needed, so the less experienced people have a better chance to participate in the sprint planning.

Who are we guesstimating the work for? Instead of trying to guess how much time it takes, isn't it more productive to go in depth in each task and have members debate their approaches, and end up coming up with a solution? How is guessing how much it will take relevant to coming up with a good solution?

No, you and I both know that devs are made guessing because other people are afraid that the devs are playing ping pong all day, and want to have a deadline to hold them accountable to.

> The Scrum Master is not a role-job. It's a role of the day...

Great, and now open Linkedin and tell me how many full time Scrum Master positions there are. Thanks.

> If he is not doing his job, in answering the questions they have and unblocking their work, the team will leave him hanging dry for a sprint or two, and he is gone.

How can the least qualified person on the team answer any questions, about anything? It implies the devs don't know their users, they don't know the application, they can't be trusted to talk to clients, and they can't be trusted to make the right technical specifications. How is a PO better than a team of highly trained engineers as a decision maker and unblocker?

The role is just a remnant of the thinking that IT department are these unsightly people who work in the basement and shouldn't be seen/talked to, so we hire a suit to front them as a more eye pleasing alternative, a gatekeeper. Anything a PO can do, a team of devs can do better. Useless role!

> Wow. I see some major depression there. A sprint gives us the chance to tick a box every few weeks, instead of achieving nothing over years.

Interesting, it seems that you believe that if there are no mini-deadlines to put them in order, developers will simply do nothing, or go on a non-tangent for years, playing with languages and prototypes.

How about something that takes 3 weeks but can't be conveniently broken down into smaller chunks? Are you gonna be trembling with shame at the end of the sprint, because you didn't deliver "value"? What would the business say! Outrage!

> That is a role at your company? It's amazing what an Agile Coaching consultant can achieve by visiting 2-3 times a year

Luckily, no. But I've had Agile consultant visiting from time to time, they never contributed with anything but try to sell us their own flavor of Scrum or SAFe or some other garbage methodology. Mind you, this was at the time when half the teams were doing Scrum anyway. But the Agile consultant is like: no, that's not really Scrum, you have to "change minor detail, like length of sprint". And then the next snake oil salesman says the same, ad infinitum.

> Is Agile the holy grail of perfection? No.

That's mildly put. Agile is a steaming pile of trash. Yes.

> Is there anything else that gets even close? Hell no, but if you know a framework that works better let us know.

Yes, I do! If you want a name: "XP", but followed loosely and not religiously.

However, I just made an even better one on the spot, called "JBG" (Just be Good). It postulates the following tenets:

- Hire good people, retain them, build them up and trust them

- Fire/let go of bad people

- No non-technical managers, scrum masters or POs whatever for technical teams, they should consist only of developers

- Continuously improve all your stuff (tests/knowledge/processes/infra/code), in whatever shape/form/directions you want to and however and whenever you want to

I intend to write a book about it, a manifesto, and consult on it!