Well, you are the manager I haven't meet in years and I wonder - are you for real, or just a developer who's wish is his manager would be this way :-) LOL ?!

Agile is not about hiding in holes for months and delivering accordingly to the time when the exit from the hole happens. That's why we try to do estimation, sprints and reviews - which in my experience always ended in mini waterfalls, tech debt and developer burn-out because of mediocre developers and tech leaders without spinal cord and pressured by mutant CSM's and mutan CPO's.

Absolute agreement - *For some reason the software profession has lost the recognition and respect it deserves, part of the fault comes from the same developers that agree to anything without regard to timelines or effort required. If they could have some self respect and say "no" a couple of times I bet software will stop becoming a commodity anymore.* It is all human nature at the end,

"Being" Agile vs. "Doing" Agile All we need is a organization certification strategy so that Agile can't be missued anymore. Otherwise - will die.

Just right - and it will work "Being" Agile vs. "Doing" Agile We need to get rid of *The False Agile(r)* and *The False CSM(r)* mutant species. Otherwise, Agile will go to the trash bin together with other IT massive failures. Peace,

See, this is exactly my point :-) LOL! You got sold the maked-up Agile not what Agile paradigm is by its content. *Being Agile* is not *Doing Agile*. At its simplistic form, this is what Agile is *be agile for real* if you fail that means you haven't been Agile as Agile says very clearly that reality MUST be prevailing over the processes and help improve delivery. The people you refer to are the ones I'm pointing the finger at them as being an extremely dangerous specie for the Agile movement - *The False Agile(r)* and *The False CSM*; these people use their paper prints for helping obscure management processes look like Agile and this is the problem you encountered. Agile is a mindset - if this mindset is not shared by the majority of the co-participants in the project, not Agile fails but the project. The change has to come reversed - people first and then you will see the results. Otherwise, as I mentioned you can't do Agile Software Development having the same attitude and perspective of someone selling eggs at the Farmer's Market or landing money at a Pawn Shop. Peace,

Ok, personal. Well, you sound like the ones who can't comprehend long sentences containing details and logic - these are or sales guys or mediocre programmers or managers who have been previously into one of the enumerated categories :-) Peace,

Agree, it just that what you describe in fact is wrong Agile :-); once the process takes over the development it is called mini-waterfalling :-) no Agile anymore. And that's why mediocre developers like it - because they can hide behind the processes instead of being exposed frontally :-). Real Agile should help good developers and help remove bad ones - if it is opposite than it is not Agile. The most efficient combination is XP programming with Agile and into a real environment of this type there is no place for bad or mediocre professionals.

LOL, looks like my most recent project just with the CEO missing the closing the way you put it and even worse empowering the idiot to win over the development LOL

Too simplistic - software development is far more than enough hard work, bigger hammers, stronger/more tractors or more plantation slaves. Software development is just much more than it can comprehend the head under the hat covering only a mercantile thinking paradigm. Software is a commodity, but if you look at it from the same perspective you look at a bin of eggs before leaving early morning for the Farmer's Market that's what you going to get - a bin of eggs, mostly rotten or cracked.

A+

No; I do - let's say try to do Agile and I'm a CSM, since its inception and on different locations and cultures; in the last 5 years, when I did it mostly in North America I never seen it succeeding; mostly the reason was hijacking the Agile and masquerading waterfall or chaotic processes under the Agile terminology/dictionary. As always, human greed and immorality overtook the basics of the Agile manifesto and lead to disastrous mini-waterfalling with dire consequences as accumulation of huge technical debt, broken estimations missed deliveries and developers psychological burn out and collapse. Of course, the poor slaves pushed to work crazy overtime and crunching tasks where always at fault. The core problem I always pointed at in the Agile communities I had the chance to talk about, is that there are no *Agile Certified Organization* certification criteria and accreditation auditing processes and trained, certified and experienced auditors. This leads to a gazillion of organization declaring themselves as Agile by saying that they do or try to do Agile but without *being Agile* in reality. Until we will have this accreditation mostly we will see failures and this will lead also to Agile going to the garbage bin of the various trials in doing better software development and having a decent profession - not one well known and renowned for all possible worker abuse and wrong doings. At the end, maybe there is no method to do better software development because of the nature of the people and the context of being a no regulated profession - this opens the door to everything and in this libertarian approach always the winner will be the one owning more power - in this case the positioning in the monetary interest stack of the project. This is nothing else than feudalistic primitivism which in time will destroy the whole industry as the older ones will pursue different career options - and I know lots of them who already did it, and the young ones will not step into this industry anymore. Wherever I have the chance to participate at interviews I see mostly immature kids and not only, some are close to their 30s, but their professional and social skills are so low that many years ago these people wouldn't have gone even over the phone screening phase.