Was alarmed to see an otherwise good article descend into a defense of Agile.
"Agile project-management methodologies didn’t alleviate the need for programmers to strive to be better coders, but they did prevent the developers from having to excessively worry about what they should be coding and whether they had done enough"
I think there are many coders here who would strongly disagree, and maybe even identify Agile as the ultimate manifestation of productivity culture.
The original idea of sprint planning was to choose only as many tasks as you feel comfortable doing in given time frame. The customer specifies priority, the developers estimate effort. Also, measuring individual productivity is strictly forbidden; the team is supposed to operate as a "black box" from the management perspective. In theory, that is.
In real life, in most companies there is pressure on the team to take more tasks than they feel comfortable doing. Sometimes there are external deadlines, like "all these tasks must be completed in the next two sprints, but hey guys, enjoy your AgileTM freedom to decide which ones get done in the first sprint, and which ones get done in the second sprint". Or you measure individual productivity by number of story points completed, and say "hey guys, feel free to set your own sustainable pace an enjoy your work-life ballance, but the 20% of you with least story points completed will get fired at the end of the year".
Agile was meant to be a replacement for management. Instead it became management's another weapon. Because management makes the ultimate decisions about how exactly agile gets implemented at your company.
I agree with this, though personally I'd distinguish between Scrum (continuously sprinting, people mindlessly trying to grab as many story points as possible to impress their boss, getting in trouble if a story overruns a sprint or takes longer than the estimate), and Kanban, which to me seems less stressful and more realistic and what the author was getting at.. IMHO at least..
"Agile project-management methodologies didn’t alleviate the need for programmers to strive to be better coders, but they did prevent the developers from having to excessively worry about what they should be coding and whether they had done enough"
I think there are many coders here who would strongly disagree, and maybe even identify Agile as the ultimate manifestation of productivity culture.