Agile isn’t dead...

A short collection of thoughts

Recently, there have been a lot of posts about the death of agile. I get it; as a collection of ideas, it’s been around for a long time. And as it was intended as a way to make software better, and has expanded to mean organisational change, it’s propogated way beyond original intent.

Of course there are issues with it:

- the certification industry has become more about monetisation than helping people. You can get certified for $50 and a good look over the scrum guide. Does it mean you’re a scrum master/product owner? You can certify in a specific scaling framework without ever having to understand agile principles...

- the roles are endless and confusing, and there is no clear and easy way to identify the good from the bad. Agile Coaching in particular. This was seen as a person who had coaching responsibility over a number of teams, but now it's a catch-all. And don't get me started on made-up roles like "Agile Project Manager" - an oxymoron if there ever was one. So how do you know who is going to give a quality service to your teams/organisations?

I could go on and really start beating up on it, but these lie with people's adaptions, and not the actual principles. And those principles are sound, still, after 18 years.

I’d like to leave it on this point: on Friday, I had the privilege of running a Lean Beer session (like Lean Coffee, but after-work hours), and we’ve got a really lovely community growing around it. One of the topics that came up had us discussing old project death-marches. They would involve an unachievable deadline, scope that could not move, code that wasn’t subject to rigorous testing until a thing was nearly fully built, and full-blown management panic. This would result in long nights and weekends, grinding yourself out to hit a deadline which would inevitably slip, moving the death march further into the future. And this was every project. And people wonder why burnout is so high in the software industry? If you’ve not experienced this, well, you’ve agile to thank for that —

• Continuous integration/continuous delivery has evolved out of XP practices, one of the core ideas of agile — good quality code can be released into production with greater confidence, at any given time
• Scrum has standardised shorter timeboxes of releasable work, meaning all activities to get a smaller increment of getting a thing “done" takes place more frequently (I know this isn’t new, but Scrum has made it ubiquitous)
• We spend more time working out how to solve problems based on priority and need, and work to implement once this is done, rather than solve all the problems up front.
• Working in multi-functional teams is better for everyone, as it encourages diversity in opinions, and reduces dependencies on other teams/roles

We all know that agile can be better, but let’s appreciate that it’s a journey, and is a lot better than what had been before.