I was an early adopter (1999-2000), and for years was excited. I was burnt out on programming and considering quitting the industry, but adopting XP made things so much saner that it turned things around for me. But circa 2007 I heard more and more horror stories about companies that were "doing Agile", by which they meant top-down imposition of some fraction of things, plus managers slapping shiny new labels on their same old bullshit.
It was heartbreaking to see something that helped me and my teams a great deal get so throughly misused. It became just another stick to beat developers with. I spent a lot of time apologizing for all the pain people endured.
It's hardly the first time, though. The original paper on Waterfall basically said, "This is a thing that is bad and does not work." But people went and did waterfall anyhow, because a) it conforms to a number of human biases, b) it reinforces the typical top-down corporate power structure, and c) provides endless opportunities for people to blame other people for problems. So in retrospect I'm not shocked at all that we've mostly turned the various Agile methods into meaningless pablum.
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I was an early adopter (1999-2000), and for years was excited. I was burnt out on programming and considering quitting the industry, but adopting XP made things so much saner that it turned things around for me. But circa 2007 I heard more and more horror stories about companies that were "doing Agile", by which they meant top-down imposition of some fraction of things, plus managers slapping shiny new labels on their same old bullshit.
It was heartbreaking to see something that helped me and my teams a great deal get so throughly misused. It became just another stick to beat developers with. I spent a lot of time apologizing for all the pain people endured.
It's hardly the first time, though. The original paper on Waterfall basically said, "This is a thing that is bad and does not work." But people went and did waterfall anyhow, because a) it conforms to a number of human biases, b) it reinforces the typical top-down corporate power structure, and c) provides endless opportunities for people to blame other people for problems. So in retrospect I'm not shocked at all that we've mostly turned the various Agile methods into meaningless pablum.