This entry is a continuation of the discussion I started yesterday. Stick long enough in any community, and over time you will hear claims about the movement being dead. For some communities, there is some reasonable truth to the claim – at a certain point in time. To others, there is not. Let’s tackle some of the background on why I think that Agile might be dead.
Other entries in this series:
Some of my long-time readers may or may not know that I was involved back in the days when the Software Craft movement started to form. I recall the vivid discussions we had around the new left side when it came to value statements, taking on the Agile manifesto by formulating stronger points that we were striving for in the Craft manifesto. After that we thought hard on our version of the 12 principles in the Agile manifesto. The whole discussion on a list of 13 people ended up in the statements:
- We care
- We practice
- We learn
- We share
To this day, I still love the brevity of those statements that Doug Bradbury eventually found in our discussion.
That was 15 years ago, though.
We didn’t change much with the manifesto. True, there is the next Global Day of Code Retreat coming up, there are many local meet-ups around the globe, various German communities in different cities, and of course the many conferences that sprang from the Software Craft and Testing (SoCraTes) (un)conferences, mostly around Europe.
I never thought that we would change the world through the publication of a manifesto, though. 15 years in, many people still struggle with TDD, taking baby steps, heck, even I do most of the time. A week after the manifesto got published, someone reported on the mailing list that so-and-so-many people had signed it in the meantime. When it came to interpreting the numbers, someone summed it up as “so-and-so-many people fight crappy code.” That felt good in the moment.
Taking a turn back to the Agile community, we’re at the point in time, 23 years after the manifesto got published, that things sort of feel different, too.
Originally, there were many methods under the Agile umbrella: Crystal, Scrum, Extreme Programming, Pragmatic Programming, Adaptive Software Development, DSDM, FDD, Conext-driven testing, you name it.
Today? In most organizations that explore which Agile flavor fits best for them, Scrum or Kanban are probably the most explored – and nothing in between. Heck, Kanban even does not want to be an Agile method.
23 years, and all we learned was Scrum or Kanban.
True, there is more. From my standpoint, we’re currently experiencing a third wave of scaling approaches with unFIX and FAST being the new entries that join more classical scaling frameworks like LeSS or Nexus from the first wave – or was it the second? I’m not sure.
Personally, I’m joining Mike Beedle’s viewpoint, that S_Fe never was an Agile scaling approach. Yet, I think, it turned many things for the worse. If you ask around in some of the S_Fe companies, one phrase keeps on repeating: “Oh, we’ve picked the things we liked from the framework. We’re not doing all of it.” To no surprise, those are also the companies that try to distance themselves from Agile.
But I digress.
I think Agile is dead in those companies that saw Agile as a new vehicle, without trying to understand the underlying paradigm. To make matters worse, the same companies took from different paradigms things they liked before understanding multi-method, multi-paradigm design decisions, and how they could be properly joined together to yield the benefits they tried to gain. Unfortunately, S_Fe with its marketing fluff that appeals to “you don’t need to change much” managers put the downfall of Agile on steroids, from my perception.
Going back to my personal story, and how I got to know Agile, people never experienced the benefits the way I did in the shops that gave up on Agile. Team work, fun, alongside with meaningful business benefits. I can totally understand that people distance themselves from it right now. I even fear I might have contributed to that downfall.
I think it’s a good thing, Agile is dead in those companies. I hope they might discover something new over time. The world of work has been shifting for some time now. Maybe it’s time to discover new ways of working in a post-Agile world. Who knows what’s good or bad?
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