Manifesto for Async Software Development (opens in new tab)

This is entirely from an engineer's perspective. The reason agile and scrum are so popular is because it works for managers.

Managers need to herd all the cats, keep them on task, and give them continuous deadlines to report status in order to keep a low level fire burning under their employees' butts.

For open source software projects and hobby projects, this type of "asynchronous" development is perfectly fine.

For corporate environments, the problem is that employees are not necessarily intrinsically motivated and also need a way to communicate regularly up a chain of authority. This is the point of meetings.

Furthermore, managers generally succeed based on social intelligence. By regularly keeping tabs on employees using real meetings, they can assess the emotional state of the team... such as the morale or whether anyone is struggling or going through personal problems that they are reluctant to broadcast.

> A question answered in a FAQ or some other form of async communication is much better than one answered by a shoulder tap.

This doesn't scale. Eventually, you get to a point where you don't know where to look for context and context ends up getting spread around multiple areas. Complexity cannot be wrapped up in a wiki obviously enough, that you can fully grasp every possible issue without comprehending the whole wiki.

It doesn't doesn't fill me with confidence that someone is actually familiar enough with Agile to criticize it effectively when they bill themselves as the 21st century alternative to something written in the 21st century.