Is Agile Evil?

I’ve never applied real agile methodologies in my job, mainly because my company uses a tweaked waterfall process. However I’ve always looked with curiosity to other systems that can make me work better and agile seems to be the most promising one.

But, after reading this (long) post entitled Why “Agile” and especially Scrum are terrible, I’m not so sure I want to try it. The author mixes both technical and psychological arguments to prove that agile and especially scrum are bad for programmers and for the entire company. His arguments seems correct to me but, of course, my lack of experience does not allow me to be an impartial judge.

However there are some points that are absolutely right. In particular, having a schedule with many short tasks and being judged only on time basis it’s the best way to produce crappy and non-reusable code.

In addition, refactoring sessions (which I consider fundamental in the life cycle of a product) are impossible. Cutting corners become the only possible way to not seem lazy and this is how you end up:

Image from CommitStrip.com (free for non-commercial uses).