A friend passed this one on to me. It's a nice rant about how buzzwords and their associated process is destroying the world of computer programming.

So much of the process that is popular these days is not what it appears to be, and to me seems designed to increase billing at the expense of creativity and flexibility.

http://radar.oreilly.com/2011/05/process-kills-developer-passion.html

In short, you're spending a lot of your time on process, and less and less actually coding the applications. I've worked on some projects where the test cases took two- or three-times as much time to code as the actual code, or where having to shoehorn in shims to make unit tests work has reduced the readability of the code. I've also seen examples of developers having to game the tools to get their line coverage or code complexity numbers to meet targets.

The underlying feedback loop making this progressively worse is that passionate programmers write great code, but process kills passion...

...the blind application of process best practices across all development is turning what should be a creative process into chartered accountancy with a side of prison. While every one of these hoops looks good in isolation (except perhaps Scrum ...), making developers jump through all of them will demoralize even the most passionate geek....

... And as an aside, if you're going to say you're practicing agile development, then practice agile development! A project where you decide before you start a product cycle the features that must be in the product, the ship date, and the assigned resources is a waterfall project. Using terms like "stories" and "sprints" just adds a crunchy agile shell, and it's madness to think anything else. And frankly, this is what has led to the entire Scrum/burndown chart mentality, because development teams aren't given the flexibility to "ship what's ready, when it's ready."

Unless the problems I'm talking about are addressed, I fear that the process/passion negative feedback loop is going to continue to drag otherwise engaged developers down into a morass of meetings and metrics-gaming.