Comment by jerf
4 days ago
I am aware that Scrum essentially defines itself as "agile". However, the Agile Manifesto defines a very, very specific sort thing as "Agile", and is what I'm calling "real agile", and Scrum is not it.
Scrum could be it, if it presented itself as "here's a set of things to consider as tools you could deploy, but hey, do whatever works". But it doesn't. It is every bit as prescriptive as any of the methodologies that real Agile is a revolt against and can and does have all of the pathologies when it is applied in places where it doesn't make sense, or even just excessively rigidly. Scrum as it is practiced in the real world responds to "it's not working" with "do it more accurately, then!", not "oh, well, fix it up as you see fit". That's why so many of us here have such a visceral distaste of it. Many of us have enough experience and run-ins with "Scrum" to know that anyone trying to claim "Oh, but it 'really' wants you to be Agile and change it to work however you need to" is in practice just motte-and-bailey. That's not how it works in the wild.
You need to figure this out sooner or later or you're going to be deeply and repeatedly taken advantage of in life: Just because someone puts a label on something doesn't mean that label is accurate. Scrum isn't Agile and I don't care how many times someone grabs a label printer, prints out the word "Agile", and slaps it on Scrum. It's plainly obviously not an Agile methodology and never was.
Agile isn't a methodology; it's a meta-methodology, which is why it's so hard to productize.
> it's a meta-methodology
It is not even that. It is basically just a roundabout statement of "We believe software developers should be in control of the entire software development process". Or even more succinctly, "No managers". The Twelve Principles highlights the things developers need to consider when there isn't a manager around to do that work for them.
Scrum, while having little to do with Agile in and of itself, suggests that if you follow it, developers can start to learn how to operate on their own. This seems to be why it is commonly associated with Agile.
> Agile isn't a methodology; it's a meta-methodology, which is why it's so hard to productize
More specifically, its a meta methodology that specifically rejects methodology as a one-size-fits-all, or even custom but top-down-imposable, product, but explicitly holds that methodology is an emergent product of continuous optimization within and specific to the team doing the work.