Stick around long enough in the agile world, and sooner or later you come across the age-old discussion about whether agile is dead – as is the case at the time of me writing these lines. Just when I had that discussion again at two recent user groups, I recalled on my way back home that I had that kind of discussion about a decade ago. So, when I came home, I had to digest my old blog entries. To my surprise, I found something similar, yet, seemingly different in my blogosphere past.
Other entries in this series:
“Agile is dead” vs. “Quality is dead”
The current discussions about agile being dead or not felt quite familiar to me. So, when I looked for older posts from me, I put the whole thing into the timeframe when we worked on the Craft manifesto. To my surprise, that wasn’t the case. The most relevant discussions I found were Quality is not dead and a rant a few years later on Quality /is/ dead.
The first entry is mainly a reaction to a blog entry from James Bach back in the days. One point I raised in there – of course – came from Jerry Weinberg:
Quality is value to some person.
James and Michael Bolton generalized Jerry’s original point over the years:
For any abstract X, X is X to some person at some time.
If we transfer that back to Agile, we get:
Agile is Agile to some person at some time.
Of course, in general, Agile is an abstract term that might mean different things to different people. The latest “Agile is dead” discussion portions stem from different understandings of what Agile may or may not mean. Given the situation in Germany right now, it seems that most larger companies stopped their investments in any agile transitions, transformation, or however they ended up calling the organizational change endeavour.
Of course, that means that the C-level suit in all of these companies stopped to see the benefits they hoped for. So, senior leadership fell back to their cost-cutting cookie cutter approaches, and threw out folks that they did not see contributing to product development – like Scrum Master, Agile Coaches, and the like.
Given we just came out of a pandemic when – a couple of years back – many Agile Coaches started to leave companies that were underinvesting into being Agile, many of them only paying lip-service to their efforts, relabelling older roles, and hoping for different results than before, the move now from senior management feels like a form of retribution – at least to me from the outside. At least, I find the situation ironic to some extent – and it would be funny if it were not as serious as I think it is.
The discussions I was part of in the past 2+ years on whether Agile is dead, alive, or maybe even undead seem strikingly similar to the discussions I was part of when Quality was declared dead, undead – and maybe even alive. I’m going to explore the different perspectives over the next few days. Let’s see where I end up.
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