Comments by "Mentat" (@_Mentat) on "Waterfall Over Agile In 2023???" video.

It's certainly a cult. They talk of ceremonies, rituals and artifacts. And the believers have religious fervor. The Scrum Masters and Product Owners support it like their (working) lives depended on it. Which they do.
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I've been doing Agile/Scrum for the last three years now. If anyone asks how it's going I say: like clockwork, i.e. if any part runs slow, everything runs slow; if any part breaks, everything breaks. It's been a disaster. The manifesto is fine but the methodology doesn't work. The power issues are valid. Scrum gives the power to business people (Product Owners) who don't know enough to decide what should be done. Engineers need to have the power if you actually want good software delivered in a timely manner.
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Not true. We sign a contract with the customer before development starts. It's extremely rare for the customer to want changes, because with our help they correctly specify their requirements upfront.
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Nailing down the requirement is a key waterfall skill. It's not impossible, or even particularly hard. But if you haven't got the discipline to do it I suppose you need Agile.
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@kevinfleischer2049 Our customers sign contracts. They could change the requirements but it would cost them. Mainly they don't. Usually we have a succession of contracts with the same customer and if they want a change or additional functionality it becomes part of the next contract a couple of years later. We're basically doing the same thing over and over again for different customers; "a hole" is not likely.
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Haha, a lot longer of course. Industry average is $50 per line of code. NASA pays $1,000 per line of code. That's the cost if you want defect free code.
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Exactly, it means management can abdicate and not learn the software. They say you self-organize and I'll just count the story points.
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What the teacher meant is your way wouldn't scale, but you have to learn a scalable methodology even though a school project doesn't need it, because in the real world you will need it.
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I, a fully qualified Scrum Master, can assure you it doesn't work.
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@edgeeffect Nothing in what I wrote implied you are currently or were recently at school.
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@archi-mendel Thanks for your response. It may surprise you to learn that I am a fully qualified Scrum Master. I know the process and know it doesn't work. Even on the SM course I asked the killer questions and got no answer. I asked, what does QA do while the devs are coding? What do the devs do while QA is testing? No real answers, just be idle it seems. We have a doc writer who gets a couple of hours of work per 2 wk sprint. Middle management asks for more people and senior management says we can see your engineers are not busy; so no more resources given. As for "self-organization" - the Scrum Guide is being followed to the letter, right down to how long each meeting should last; senior managers would allow deviation, but there are three layers of management between them and us. Our code base is vast and ancient. Some of it dates back to the 1980s. It runs at thousands of sensitive institutions. It is deeply intrusive; almost like delivering a replacement operating system. Really you need 20 years experience on it as an engineer to even say something sensible about it. The size of our market footprint gives us a guaranteed income and lets nonsense take hold and the recently arrived Agile fans wave their kanbans and backlogs and look like they are delivering. But nothing new has been created since they arrived. I have never dared point out to senior management it's all smoke and mirrors. The experienced engineers are leaving in disgust but no one mentions the enormous staff turnover.
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@davetoms1 I scored 98% on the Scrum Alliance certification test. I know my stuff. And Archi is correct, no release forecasting is possible in Agile because every two weeks the stakeholders are invited to change the direction. Also Dave, why don't you answer my questions above: what do QA and Doc do while Devs are coding? At the moment our QA is idle for the first week because there's nothing to test, and the Devs are idle for the second week because QA wouldn't have time to test it if they did code something. Scrum is a productivity killer.
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@davetoms1 So, again, no real answer. Yes we use automation and advanced development tools. But the simple fact is that no matter how high the productivity the methodology keeps people idle when they could be working under a different methodology. And no, QAs cannot write code. Our devs have advanced degrees and decades of relevant experience. Saying to a QA, nothing to test atm so write some code would be absurd. They wouldn't know where to begin. Likewise the tech writers. The root of the problem is dividing everything into teams, sprints and stories and only doing what can be completed in a sprint. Whoever invented that was mad.
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@archi-mendel You accused me of having "little understanding of Agile and Scrum". I stated my certification to show I had plenty of knowledge and understanding. It was only to refute your allegation that I mentioned my certification, not because I measure myself or others on certificates alone, or even at all really.
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@davetoms1 It's understandable that you leave without having provided an answer, because there is no answer. Even the instructor on my course had no answer; it's a fundamental flaw in Scrum.
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@archi-mendel I was simply refuting that our use of Agile/Scrum is not successful due to a lack of understanding on my part. Scrum doesn't work because it is intrinsically flawed. I don't keep saying "Even my instructors...". I once said "Even the instructor...". He may or may not not have been smart, it's irrelevant, but he was qualified as an instructor, and he could not answer the question I put to Dave Toms above.
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@archi-mendel Qualified means has a qualification.
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@archi-mendel The certifying authority is the Scrum Alliance. And I am not a Scrum Master. I am qualified as a Scrum Master but I do not perform that role. I am a developer specializing in back-end and low-level code such as device drivers. I was offered a Scrum Master position but since I could see Scrum does not work, I declined.
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