Coconut Headphones: Why Agile Has Failed
All these late "agile has failed" posts are out of touch with reality. They assume that it is always possible to get the best developers and best managers to work with the problem on hand.<p>I'm a consultant. Officially my title is Senior Test Engineer and usually my job is to go to a company where shit has already hit the fan or will hit in a short time.<p>The reality is that the company has a bunch of developers who are mediocre at best (and maybe one or two good ones) and managers who do not understand the situation. And of course the budget is already been eaten.<p>They want to ship their product and make some money with that so they can continue to live their life. If I go there and say hey, you need better developers, more rapid prototyping and managers who are technical enough, nothing will change. Nothing will change because there aren't "rock star" developers avaialble, there isn't time to find new managers and definetly no motivation to change everything right now.<p>Sure in some sense I might be correct to say so, but my goal is not to show my superiority, but to improve the situation.<p>But if I teach them a little Scrum, help them setup some CI and so on, they almost always perform better.<p>And then this statement "Because creating good software is so much about technical decisions and so little about management process, I believe that there is very little place for non-technical managers in any software development organisation."<p>No. Good software comes from understanding the needs of your customers and meetings those needs. Shitty developers have and will create awesome products just because they know what the users want and need. "Agile" helps even the shitties companies to meet the needs of their customers.