I've worked at over a dozen places claiming to be agile to some degree, shape, or form, and have yet to see a process that's even remotely close, let alone agile. The failure of agile isn't that it takes time to learn and practice correctly or that it's too rigid. Its main failure is an inability to communicate its purpose to its users effectively. Agile is a good process in theory, but it seems the original creators did not anticipate the people that would try to put it into place and their agendas.
Agile goes against the mandates of almost all corporate culture in that it requires one to get out of the estimates as deadline mindset that rules corporate development. Agile tries to be flexible because that's the only rational option when developing software. When faced with irrationality, however, agile just becomes another justification for deadlines, time-wasting meetings (standup and otherwise), and other nonsense that leads to a productivity plunge everywhere I've seen it implemented.
This corporate culture based around deadlines and subservience of engineers is something that cannot simply be defeated with a methodology, especially when that methodology is, at best, only partially adopted. I will go as far to say that there is no methodology that can change this mindset. Regardless of what the author thinks, corporations and their managers will simply not allow something that will disrupt their world views and opinions.
While agile was trying to solve the problem of waterfall design--which is not always a problem and sometimes the best process--many corporate schmucks (both in management and engineering, both at giant companies and startups) saw it as a way to eliminate the design stage altogether. What great software has resulted! While agile was pushing for quicker iteration and release cycles so that code and features doesn't pile up and prevent / delay / disrupt the release, many corporate schmucks (managers only in this case) decided to use it as a justification for working their engineers overtime so they could push the features they "promised" out live by the release date.
There are few things in this industry that have wasted as much time as the doomed implementation of agile. Many have gotten rich off of it, but it has provided little to no value. The idea that processes can be malleable and flexible that the author advances is just pure insanity. It may work with a group of hackers cranking something out, but something like that will especially be discarded or twisted into something dark by management.
This idea, that a perfectly good process can be turned against itself is what the author does not understand and why his new process will likely fail in the same, dangerous way (should it gain acceptance and adoption), wreaking havoc on the engineers and managers it was supposed to help.
Agile goes against the mandates of almost all corporate culture in that it requires one to get out of the estimates as deadline mindset that rules corporate development. Agile tries to be flexible because that's the only rational option when developing software. When faced with irrationality, however, agile just becomes another justification for deadlines, time-wasting meetings (standup and otherwise), and other nonsense that leads to a productivity plunge everywhere I've seen it implemented.
This corporate culture based around deadlines and subservience of engineers is something that cannot simply be defeated with a methodology, especially when that methodology is, at best, only partially adopted. I will go as far to say that there is no methodology that can change this mindset. Regardless of what the author thinks, corporations and their managers will simply not allow something that will disrupt their world views and opinions.
While agile was trying to solve the problem of waterfall design--which is not always a problem and sometimes the best process--many corporate schmucks (both in management and engineering, both at giant companies and startups) saw it as a way to eliminate the design stage altogether. What great software has resulted! While agile was pushing for quicker iteration and release cycles so that code and features doesn't pile up and prevent / delay / disrupt the release, many corporate schmucks (managers only in this case) decided to use it as a justification for working their engineers overtime so they could push the features they "promised" out live by the release date.
There are few things in this industry that have wasted as much time as the doomed implementation of agile. Many have gotten rich off of it, but it has provided little to no value. The idea that processes can be malleable and flexible that the author advances is just pure insanity. It may work with a group of hackers cranking something out, but something like that will especially be discarded or twisted into something dark by management.
This idea, that a perfectly good process can be turned against itself is what the author does not understand and why his new process will likely fail in the same, dangerous way (should it gain acceptance and adoption), wreaking havoc on the engineers and managers it was supposed to help.