Agile is bullshit, especially if you need to do deeper thought or have a project that takes longer than your sprint. I don’t mind the daily stand ups, but sometimes you have to get creative with your updates to make it sound like you did something. Some days you can knock out a ton of stories, some days you bang your head against the wall trying every iteration you can think of to get something working.
My beef with agile is all the terminology is meaningless unless you’ve taken an agile class. Scrum master? Release train engineer? Agile coach? They are completely inscrutable terms unless you have a glossary. Even if you have a glossary, what the people in those positions do still seems kind of unclear.
Plus, they are another layer of people that aren’t directly contributing to software development. They’re not coding, testing, or doing technical support for your customers. It just seems like they are there to make you feel bad because you didn’t do what you planned to do for the sprint because you hit a technical roadblock. Or they give you shit because you messed up some report in Jira because you moved a card to the wrong status.
It made sense to me when I did an Agile class and they talked about the different "flavors" of Agile. And by flavor, I mean companies that are trying to sell Agile as a product. To differentiate themselves, they came up with different terminology. Instead of a project, it's "stories" or "epics" etc. A manager is "scrum master" or "product owner." Scrum Alliance has different terminology than Scaled Agile who has different terminology than the International Consortium for Agile.
When I looked at it as a product being sold, it made me dislike the concept even more. They only invented new words for things to confuse people and try to sell them a new "process." And that's BS to me. They all have their own certification structure, and none of them work well as a process together.
Which to me means the entire thing is a waste of time. A process doesn't need a company behind it selling you on it. It should stand on its own. Agile is just the newest buzzword in the string of leans and kanbans (which it heavily borrows from).
Do you happen to work as a federal contract specialist? We obsess over all of the phrases in my office, especially 'the road-map'.
Used to be a contract specialist here. My work now is similar, but more on the program management side (we do a lot of the pre-award documentation, and we're all CORs). Contracts is such a horrendous career field. It may have just been our contracts office, but I feel bad for anyone stuck in it.