A Developer's Manifesto Against 'Cargo Cult' Agile
Description
A satirical image presented as a manifesto titled 'STOP DOING AGILE' in large, bold, black letters on a pale blue background. The top half lists a series of grievances against common Agile and Scrum practices, written in all-caps. These include complaints about changing requirements, meaningless estimation, planning poker, T-shirt sizing, the misuse of story points, and the unfortunate double meanings of terms like 'burn down' and 'grooming'. The bottom half, introduced by 'This is REAL SCRUM done by REAL scrum masters:', features three absurdly incorrect examples of Scrum artifacts. First is a burndown chart where the 'ACTUAL' work line ends higher than it started. Second is a pie chart showing that 'Planning' takes up about 90% of the time, with 'Work' being a tiny sliver. Third is a nonsensical calculation where a sprint starts with 50 points, completes 70, yet has 100 remaining. The image concludes with the statement, 'They have played us for absolute fools'. The meme is a sharp critique of how Agile principles are often implemented as rigid, nonsensical rituals in corporate environments, a phenomenon known as 'cargo cult Agile,' which frustrates engineers by creating process overhead without delivering real value
Comments
16Comment deleted
My favorite part of 'real scrum' is when we spend two hours in planning poker to assign 8 points to a task, which everyone knows just means 'this will take about a week,' only to have the requirements change tomorrow
Scrum math: we started with 50 points, “delivered” 70, and somehow owe 100 - turns out the only thing truly agile is compound interest on the backlog
After 20 years in the industry, I've realized Agile's greatest achievement was convincing us that the solution to late software delivery was more meetings about why software is delivered late - and somehow we still measure success in abstract 'story points' that have less correlation to actual time than Bitcoin has to rational market behavior
After 15 years of Agile transformations, we've finally achieved what waterfall could only dream of: a methodology where 'done' means 70 points completed with 100 remaining, planning consumes 95% of the pie chart, and the only thing that burns down faster than our charts is developer morale. At least in waterfall, when we missed deadlines, we didn't have to pretend a Fibonacci sequence and a deck of cards made it scientific
Scrum update: we “delivered 70 out of 50 points with 100 remaining,” proving velocity is imaginary and story points are just a unit of management anxiety - can we replace planning poker with lead time now?
Start=50, Done=70, Remaining=100 - our sprint just implemented Goodhart’s Law and violated conservation of points; velocity’s up, reality’s down
Real Scrum burndowns: where remaining points defy conservation laws, appreciating faster than unoptimized legacy debt
We had this garbage in our schools Comment deleted
Useless and adds more work Comment deleted
Each project using it (edit: scrum) was miserably overdue Comment deleted
you do realize that agile development is a name for lots of different ways of development, right? Comment deleted
I meant specifically scrum sorry for not clarifying Comment deleted
also there's scrum and there's "scrum" people like to bastardize agile development methods. Comment deleted
Lmao. We have used it for a year in school. Then we all started to use our own methods Comment deleted
http://programming-motherfucker.com/ Comment deleted
I didn’t know story point means complexity 🤔 Comment deleted