> (instead of wrecking your project with a fake deadline every year, wreck your project with a fake deadline very month.)

I have worked in both (albeit as a junior dev), and the culture of the environment and the severity of the deadline meant much more than the space between deadlines. Deadlines at a tax company are always going to be worse than one with no high and low periods. Missing a back to school launch in edtech is going to be catastrophic, and I'd rather know sooner than later so that we can pull things out of the release.

In the massive integration days, everyone had already done most of the work and there were a lot of pieces that were 70% complete, and the integration dependencies made it brutally difficult to pull something out of a release. I will defend short iterations all day long.

Remember that "sustainable pace" also came out of the agile community. Kent Beck called it a "40 hour week" in XP.

> The standup that inexplicably happens first thing in the morning when you struggle to remember what you did the day before.

Does nobody else keep notes on their days? That said, what is important at a standup is "who needs help" or "who is waiting on something?" e.g. what is falling through the cracks? It helps to get this information on a daily basis, yes.

> The retrospective that I only want to answer with "I am so tired at the end of this sprint that I just want to go ride my bike in the hills or drink some beer or smoke some pot or play a videogame, not sit around uncomfortably in a group of people that are either disengaged and hiding it or doing a good job of pretending to be engaged"

I will defend retros, but only if they result in changes that make the team a better place. If I was in a retro that had low engagement, I'd explicitly call it out in the retro that the format is not generating change.

> To me it is fighting works to bring up the PMBOK because the PMBOK doesn't specify a particular process but it does enumerate the things that have to be managed to manage a project, in "agile the good parts" you are just addressing all of these on a weekly cycle instead of a yearly or longer cycle.

I'm not talking about 7th edition PMBOK here. Let's go back to the 2000 edition.

"Each project phase is marked by completion of one or more deliverables. A deliverable is a tangible, verifiable work product such as a feasibility study, a detail design, or a working prototype. The deliverables, and hence the phases, are part of a generally sequential logic designed to ensure proper definition of the product of the project."

2.1 and 2.2 talk about waterfall and spiral before heading into stakeholder management. It follows through the entire system - consider what integrated change control looked like in those days. It's all things we take for granted now - when was the last time you had to write a design doc that was longer than 2 pages? When was the last time you got in a room to hash out and negotiate scope for a year of work? It's truly brutal!

Now, this isn't to say I love Scrum. I agree that if you are letting your metrics get in the way of your work then you've done the exact wrong thing. If you know you need to start building your model early then you start building your model early. If you aren't paying attention to your dependencies, then the process has failed and maybe you jump to something else.

I'm not even saying there are no flaws in agile, Scrum or otherwise! However, so many of the things that came out of agile were net positive.