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Why Agile is Dead

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Why Agile is Dead

We killed it on purpose

Jun 10, 2019
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Why Agile is Dead

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I’m sick and tired of people saying, “We do Agile development.”

Most companies really don’t. What they do is some variant of Scrum with a some parts of their business screaming at them for projections of where they’ll be at the end of the quarter, and so they live in two worlds: the dev team does Scrum, and the rest of the business does waterfall based on the projections of the Scrum team.

black rolling armchair under white table
Photo by İrfan Simsar on Unsplash

The State of the Universe

That world I put forth. Doesn’t really sound much like Agile’s principles. It doesn’t sound like:

Deliver working software frequently, from a couple of weeks to a couple of months, with a preference to the shorter timescale.

But—you say—it’s fine because the dev team is running an Agile process with Scrum, right?

Depends.

Those who advocate adhering to Scrum often forget one of the primary declarations of the Agile Manifesto:

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools

Scrum implements a flavor of iterative development and agility, complete with its own strange phrases (e.g. “sprints” and “retrospectives” and “story points”). However, when a people start to hammer on others for not following a particular process, instead of talking about the outcomes they’re looking for, then the process has stopped being Agile.

How is that dead?

Very few people actually talk about Agile’s outcomes and core principles any more. You won’t get in trouble for failing to:

Build projects around motivated individuals. Give them the environment and support they need, and trust them to get the job done.

But you will very likely get someone upset at you for

  • failing to formulate a user story in the sacred pattern of “As a user..”

  • skipping a retrospective

  • having daily stand ups that are too short

  • having daily stand ups that are too long

  • forgetting to structure your JIRA workflow correctly

So yeah, it’s dead because we value the process and following the rules over creating valuable software.

And it’s not just me that thinks so:

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