DOA

Welcome to the “Death of agile” series. Most of these posts take the form of open letters to members of the community, but this introductory post sets the stage and outlines my understanding of what agile is, and where it fits into the pantheon of software development methods.

See also:

Open letter to Dan North
Open letter to Chris Matts
Open letter to Gabriel Steinhardt

Cast your mind back (if you’re old enough) to the 1990s. There was there a proliferation of lightweight development methods, such as DSDM, Crystal, XP, Scrum and more. These approaches became popular because organisations were finding that their traditional development techniques were frequently leading to project failures. With the traditional methods it only became apparent that things were not going well after a lot of work had been done and a lot of money had been spent. The lightweight methods, however, worked with short iterations, engaging the customer early and often, to ensure that the product kept moving in the right direction, or that it could be cancelled early and cheaply.

Then in 2000 a bunch of consultants representing these lightweight methods came together to see if they had anything in common. The result was the Agile Manifesto, which is itself fairly lightweight. The manifesto talks about values – valuing people, valuing the flexibility, valuing trust, valuing communication – and emphasises that the customer values stuff that works. The manifesto doesn’t talk about how this should happen, what roles should exist or what technical practices should be followed. In fact the manifesto contains NO DETAILS.

Kevlin Henney said it beautifully in a recent online interview: ” greatest weakness is when it is perceived as a fixed set of practices, which explains why a lot of people, within, […]

Welcome to another post in my “Death of agile” series. This post is an open letter to Gabriel Steinhardt, a Product Management expert from Blackblot.

See also:

Death of agile
Open letter to Dan North
Open letter to Chris Matts

Dear Gabriel,

In your keynote at Agile On The Beach and your subsequent blog post you characterise agile practitioners as “confused … about how Agile should be implemented.”

Let me clear one thing up for you: agile is not a “product development method.” If you take a brief look at the Agile Manifesto you will quickly see that it is a set of guiding values and principles. Specifically the manifesto makes no mention of a “Product Owner”, so any confusion that you might have encountered over interpretations of this role is strictly limited to implementations of Scrum.

More generally, I assert that confusion among adherents to a philosophy, methodology or belief system does not logically invalidate that system. There is confusion and disagreement among Product Managers, despite your implication to the contrary. I have no opinion on your company’s product management methodology, but I’m sure I could find successful project managers who disagree about its utility.

Recall that agile approaches first came into existence to avoid expensive project failures that were attributed to ‘Big Design Up Front’ approaches favoured by traditional waterfall methods. Your suggestion that developers have no place in the ‘problem’ space, and all communication should be mediated through a “Product Architect”, seems like a retrograde step that brought back memories of nightmares I have no wish to relive.

You go on to admit that you “do not know much about Agile or other product development methods which reside in the solution space.” Agile approaches are not limited to the solution space and […]