Agile, in general, annoys me these days. It's loaded with jargon that seems intended to obfuscate at every level from management to droid what is actually happening. Which is generally annoying customers with constant software updates where the features are bugs. Yeah, yeah, but look how quickly we fix them, they'll say. Scrum that.
Of all the development "methodologies" I have been exposed to and had to work within over the years including but not limited to Waterfall, SSADM, V, Headless Chicken, Death March, Mongolian Horde and combinations thereof (Headless Mongolian Horde Death March is no fun at all) I think Agile is absolutely the worst.
To work at all it requires a degree of involvement and commitment on a near daily basis from the product owner (customer dear boy, customer) that just isn't possible when the customer has to get on with his or her own job. In the infinitely improbable event that the customer does have the time to spare he or she will turn out to have either no bloody clue or to want 10 different things, all mutually incompatible, within the space of an hour.
And don't get me started on management who expect programmers to write solid production quality code against evanescent or non-existant specifications and with hopelessly woolly acceptance criteria in zero time using tools that don't remain stable for two months together.
And what Bledlow says; goes. It's all just fresh lipstick on the same old pigs.
