Three Deadly Sins of Agile Development

My counterpoint to a LinkedIn discussion: Why Most of Developers are Not Happy with Agile?

While I'm a true believer in Agile development and someone who has suffered through many of the miserable alternatives, I think it is fair to acknowledge that Agile has distinct points of failure that could cause developers to hate it.

First and foremost is BUS Syndrome: The disease of Bad User Stories run rampant. Without proper buy-in from management, frequent involvement with end-users and proper story grooming, developers are left sifting through the weak tea leaves of vague requirements for what needs to be actually built. Iterations can become nothing but demoralizing re-writes and reversals.

Second, Death Sprints. These are the same as Death Marches harking back to the age of 6-to18-month Waterfall life cycles only shorter and more brutal as 160-hours of work gets regularly coerced down to 80-hours to fit into each sprint. As always, bad management can find  excuses to blame their bad planning on developers doing the work. "Velocity" just becomes another whip and two-week sprints just provide more frequent whipping posts in the slave yard of a dysfunctional organization.

Third, Procrastination by Sprint. This is sort of the opposite of Death Sprints, where indecisive management can't set goals or rally support for clear initiatives and so is perfectly happy to put off decision-making from sprint to sprint, populating user stories with fluff and busy work. There's nothing worse than having to solve tough technical problems that you know will be made obsolete by upcoming initiatives or shifts in technology that everyone (except management) sees coming.

Again, I'm an enthusiastic proponent of Agile and see it as a tremendously humane agent of change in software development. However, every revolution has its Dark Side where its weaknesses, like the ones above, can be corrupted. So, it is worthwhile to acknowledge cracks in Agile's shiny armor to protect ourselves from being wounded by them.