Of chickens and pigs

Can I just say how much agile sucks? Our starting point was a team of developers (all developers, mind you, not a single non-coder in sight - even our QA could code) who would meet for 2 minutes in the morning by rolling their chairs over in a common direction and know what they had to do for the rest of the day. The more we worked together, the better we got at it. Apparently this is known as "cowboy coding" and is frowned upon.

Somebody thought we weren't high performing enough so they combined us with another team and now we are doing agile. That means we spend 20% of our time in meetings where we are speculating about the complexity of issues that we aren't allowed to work on yet. The rest of the time we are explaining what we are doing with every hour of our day while scrambling to compensate for our earlier erroneous estimates.

We don't have time to think, let alone think out of the box. There is always the looming deadline of the next morning when you will have to explain how far along you are on a task and cross out some hours on a post it note.

See, to the me the biggest issue is that the gods of agile believe that estimation is a skill that most developers suck at because they haven't practiced enough. They don't realize that estimation is always a crapshoot because you can't know in advance how long a task is going to take and certainly not to the hour the way that we are expected to. Programming is an art, it's not data entry.