It's not so much Basecamp, but Agile mixed with Scrum and then enforced very strictly that's the issue.
Some companies will take the Agile philosophy (originally simple and short) and pervert it into a waterfall by adding extreme Scrum ceremonies like endless points poker (https://www.atlassian.com/blog/platform/scrum-poker-for-agil...) and detailed retrospectives (https://echometerapp.com/en/retrospective-tools-online/), sometimes with the help of outside Agile coaches. Unfortunately, this corrupt version of it seems way more popular than the original Agile philosophy (which, yes, a simple Kanban can do).
Scrumfall warps the whole philosophy from small chunks of iterative autonomous work into quarters of pre-planned top down work, just broken down into absurd things like fibonnaci numbers or t-shirt sizes instead of hours. It makes middle management look organized at the expense of decreasing worker productivity, basically by hiding micromanagement behind tooling. Uses a lot of ceremony and jargon to do a waterfall by another name.
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Typically that's done in other tools, like Jira plus outside ceremony software (yes, there is an entire SaaS niche for these ceremonies).
Basecamp doesn't do that, to its credit. It is its own workflow (Shape Up).
I dislike it for other reasons, but less so than Scrumfall. Basecamp the software is slow and doesn't format code very well, and is pretty disorganized (multiple projects, kanban boards, chats, message boards, to-dos, check-ins etc lead to many sources of truth, and it's impossible to find anything even a week later). Shape Up the methodology is too vague and abstract IMO and has very slow iterations and lacks a focus on customer needs and wishes. But both are still a huge improvement over Scrumfall.
Yeah, I agree on pretty much all of that. My point was actually a much smaller one, about just part of it:
> It's not so much Basecamp, but Agile mixed with Scrum and then enforced very strictly that's the issue.
Namely, how the scrumsters and other hucksters have taken this "agile mixed with Scrum" and called that Agile-with-a-capital-A. Or, as you seem to be saying, taken Agile-with-a-capital-A and mixed it up with their own shit and saying that that's The Real Thing[TM]. Is there even such a thing as Agile-with-a-capital-A? I wonder, kind of doubt it... The whole idea seems about contemporaneous with the beginnings of the corruption of the original concept, so I suspect it's theirs.
Either way: Don't let them get away with it! Don't even talk about "Agile", with a capital A, because that implies there is a hard-and-fast definition for someone to usurp. And if people think there is such a thing, some such huckster will inevitably usurp it.
I think that battle is lost, unfortunately :( In every single team I've ever been a part of, Agile is used exclusively in the Scrumfall sense (I didn't come up with that second term either; it's just what the post-Agile blogosphere calls it).
When I point out that, done this way, it goes against the entire philosophy of the original Agile Manifesto... I just get shrugs. People don't care what it used to mean; when they say it now, they mean the points and ceremonies and masters and the whole ugly shebang. It's not a battle I have the energy to fight.
When a workflow isn't like that, but is just lean & simple on its own, they don't go out of their way to call it Agile or agile, uppercase or lowercase. It's just "a simple workflow" or something like that, or else some explicit other workflow (like Shape Up). I think a lot of folks have been burnt out by Scrumfall and try to practice alternatives.
I've made a point to start asking potential employers how they handle project management. If they say Agile of any sort, I'll assume the worst and just walk away...
Some companies will take the Agile philosophy (originally simple and short) and pervert it into a waterfall by adding extreme Scrum ceremonies like endless points poker (https://www.atlassian.com/blog/platform/scrum-poker-for-agil...) and detailed retrospectives (https://echometerapp.com/en/retrospective-tools-online/), sometimes with the help of outside Agile coaches. Unfortunately, this corrupt version of it seems way more popular than the original Agile philosophy (which, yes, a simple Kanban can do).
Scrumfall warps the whole philosophy from small chunks of iterative autonomous work into quarters of pre-planned top down work, just broken down into absurd things like fibonnaci numbers or t-shirt sizes instead of hours. It makes middle management look organized at the expense of decreasing worker productivity, basically by hiding micromanagement behind tooling. Uses a lot of ceremony and jargon to do a waterfall by another name.
----------
Typically that's done in other tools, like Jira plus outside ceremony software (yes, there is an entire SaaS niche for these ceremonies).
Basecamp doesn't do that, to its credit. It is its own workflow (Shape Up).
I dislike it for other reasons, but less so than Scrumfall. Basecamp the software is slow and doesn't format code very well, and is pretty disorganized (multiple projects, kanban boards, chats, message boards, to-dos, check-ins etc lead to many sources of truth, and it's impossible to find anything even a week later). Shape Up the methodology is too vague and abstract IMO and has very slow iterations and lacks a focus on customer needs and wishes. But both are still a huge improvement over Scrumfall.