> At least within my organisation, we do not design anything up front. We’re agile
Agile doesn't mean forgo design completely.
> We don’t think about proper api modelling. We’re agile.
See previous point.
> We also do barely any testing. We’re agile.
It's difficult, if not impossible, to be agile without testing. If you want to move fast, you want to be confident that your latest change didn't break anything.
> We do rewrite the UI a dozen times based on user feedback. After all, we’re agile.
Sounds like you built a complete UI before any users could give you feedback. That's the opposite of agile.
I like how you quoted all the text except the part where I said “I’m sure agile done right is great”. (And that most organisations don’t do agile right).
But in the name of agile, business tends to get away with a lot of bad decisions, at least in the places I’ve worked.
Is it all as bad as it sounds? No, but the times I’ve heard we’re not thinking about design upfront under the name of agile is staggering.
Also what I dislike about the agile way of working is that whenever somebody presents any argument against it, people always say “that’s not agile”. Great. But if it is how people DO agile, that argument is moot.
It’s like REST. Rest is great. But nobody (almost nobody) actually does Rest like described in the original whitepaper. We can’t just ignore the issues resulting from this discrepancy.
Which is funny because agile allows for almost anything. Even the Scrum Guide says that the process must be adjusted to the needs of the project. It's not even an option. Yet scrum meetings are treated as if they were religious gatherings.
Can you point to any of the 12 principles which says that we should do "barely any testing"? I can point to some that say "deliver working software" and "it's the only valid measure of progress". If testing helps you deliver working software, then do testing, that's agile.
Sarcasm does always, without exception, sabotage a factual discussion into confusion about what people are actually saying (because that remains unclear even when you fully recognize the sarcasm).
I’m also fairly sure most organisations don’t do Agile right.
At least within my organisation, we do not design anything up front. We’re agile.
We don’t think about proper api modelling. We’re agile.
We also do barely any testing. We’re agile.
We do rewrite the UI a dozen times based on user feedback. After all, we’re agile.