I hate Agile Development

I really hate, loath and detest "Agile Development". At least I hate how they use it where I work. For the record I actually agree with most of the principles and points of Agile Development. I'm pretty sure I have said so before. But what they do in the name of Agile Development where I work is really terrible.

The list of "crimes" conducted by the development teams against databases and development in general by their "use" of Agile methods continues to get longer and longer. Lately I have had to deal with a number of such crimes and their consequences.

• One group went ahead with development against nothing more than a strawman design, that in turn was for only verbally stated requirements. No one could agree in a meeting I attended what the actual requirements were. The number of times someone said "I assumed he meant ..." was incredible.
• Another group designed and implemented their own tables, but now have no time to have their database design reviewed before the release deadline. It "must" be delivered as it is, because it is too late to change anything.
  
• Another group simply did not bother to document anything. When asked at how they arrived at their final solution and the analysis they went through, they could not explain or justify anything.
• All of the groups have used the phrase "we left that for another sprint" for some major, critical piece of functionality. They are simply ignoring anything that is too difficult.
  
• Iteration speed is more important than getting it right or meeting all the requirements. The fact that the speed of iteration is introducing more errors that need to be corrected by future sprints never gets flagged by anyone. I am sure the quality of what is being delivered is going down, but everyone else is happy that we now have some more buttons to click on the user facing screens and forms.
  
• Design and code reviews are simply ignored. The only measurement seems to be the volume of exposed and visible functionality delivered. Whether it works or not is never really considered. By that time the developers have moved onto the next sprint, and the next piece of functionality to be delivered. The push is for additional functionality added to the application software at all costs.
• Many application level requirements are simply ignored in early development sprints, just to deliver some usable functionality as early as possible. The fact that the initial design and development cannot be extended in the future to meet the ignored requirements is itself simply ignored.
  

I really want to like Agile, but the things done in the name of Agile are truly horrible. The attitude of simply ignoring critical dependencies and then expecting the rest of the world to reorganise itself around their particular problem and solve it for them is amazing. And if you don't put everything down immediately and jump , you are accussed of being the blocker who is holding up development and stopping delivery of the wonderful software they have all developed. The fact that it is seriously crippled and will never work properly is somehow never their problem. And the most common answer to my any question I ask about the development they did is "we never had time to do that (so we didn't)".

I now term Agile the "ignore it today, it will be someone else's problem tomorrow" development methodology. I really do think that many of the developer's believe in a world of magic fairies or pixies that will sprinkle magic Agile dust everywhere in the middle of the whole development, and all of their ignored issues will just disappear and go away. Unfortunately, everyone else is living and dealing with the real world. Have you ever tried living in a house built and delivered one room at a time, all with separately laid foundations, and installed plumbing, electrics, windows and doors? It is a mess, and it gets worse over time as more and more rooms are added on, because there was never an overall design, and no one ever bothered to think about future requirements until they had to deliver them.