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.
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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: “[Agile’s] greatest weakness is when it is perceived as a fixed set of practices, which explains why a lot of people, within, on the edges of, and outside the agile community still don’t ‘get it’.”
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