I ran across an interesting Web page today: Agile @ 10: Ten Authors of The Agile Manifesto Celebrate its Tenth Anniversary. The editors at The Pragmatic Bookshelf contacted the 17 signers of the original Agile Manifesto and asked them to contribute their thoughts about developments in the Agile world over the succeeding 10 years. Ten of the 17 signers contributed publishable responses, which are collected in the article. The contributors – Andy Hunt, Kent Beck, Ron Jeffries, Jon Kern, Ken Schwaber, James Grenning, Arie van Bennekum, Stephen J. Mellor, Ward Cunningham, and Dave Thomas – shared reflections on the extent to which their bold statement changed the development world.
The article led me to read lots more about Agile, including the Agile at 10 series of articles here at SD Times.
For the most part, these articles stick to a predictable formula. With varying degrees of humor and self-effacement, the signers express parental pride in the path the Agile philosophy has traversed from offbeat mission statement to mainstream acceptance.
But as I read more closely, I noticed something else. At one point or another, in one article or another, almost every one of the signers tacitly admitted that the Agile movement has not lived up to his hopes. This quote from Andy Hunt is typical:
Last summer, I had the good fortune to visit a “very advanced” Agile shop. These folks really did embrace agile methods with a discipline, completeness, and a zealous fervor that would be hard to match. In many ways, they could have been a poster child for Agile methods...But these weren’t productive developers freed from mindless process dogma. They were Agile slaves. The dogma they followed was ours, and they followed it well. And as with many organizations in a similar position, they saw some promising results. Continuous integration, refactoring, unit tests, pair programming—all these techniques yielded some benefit. But they weren’t thinking, they weren’t reacting, they weren’t being agile. When problems came up, they addressed them with all the grace and elegance of a deer caught in the terrifying blaze of alien headlights. They knew how to do Agile; they didn’t know how to be agile.
Ron Jeffries told The Pragmatic Bookshelf, “I had imagined more. I had hoped that many people would adopt these ideas, and I had imagined a significant step upward in project success among those who did adopt them. I had imagined the industry really moving up a notch. What happened is that many have adopted the ideas, at least in name, but that few of them have attained anything like the benefit that is possible.”
In the same article, James Grenning said, “Many developers are still unaware of Agile, or only know the misconceptions. The idea that more upfront work is needed is deeply ingrained in the software development mindset. Code bases are a mess, dragging teams and products to a standstill.” He concluded, “Now we have organizations that have a few Scrum Masters and proclaim themselves Agile, but that continue to spend months in analysis and design, and similar amounts of effort in test and fix. They have stories and iterations, but ignore relative effort estimates and velocity. Code is deteriorating. Tests are not written. And they wonder why Agile is not working for them.”
I find Hunt's wistful observation insightful and moving. At its heart, the Agile Manifesto was a declaration of independence from the shackles of traditional development methods. The signers advocated not new processes, but new values and a new attitude.
The sad irony is that instead of overthrowing slavish commitment to orthodoxy, Agile has spawned a new orthodoxy – complete with certified tools, recommended texts, and a thriving culture of consultants to descend upon your organization and tell you how to do Agile right.
More and more shops now think of themselves as Agile. They're investing in Agile training and attempting to adopt Agile methods such as Scrum and Kanban. But they've missed the point. Instead of becoming enlightened freethinkers, they've drunk the Kool-Aid and joined the Cult of Agile. Dogma and orthodoxy are alive and well. At the cutting edge of our profession are the people Andy Hunt calls “Agile slaves.”
As Dave Thomas told The Pragmatic Bookshelf, “There’s this growing tendency to treat the word 'Agile' as a noun. People say, 'we’re doing Agile.' But friends, Agile is not a noun. It’s an adjective, meaning to be able to move quickly and easily.”
Is your organization agile? Or is it just “doing Agile”?
Web recommendation: The Supreme Court of the United States has agreed to hear a case in which police tracked a suspect's location by placing a GPS device on his car and querying its location every 10 seconds for 28 consecutive days – without a warrant. The question, of course, is whether the government should have the power to use technology in this way. The stakes are high and the right answer should be obvious to all of us. (Isn't it?) The case is summarized well in this GigaOM article. J.D. say check it out.
J.D. Hildebrand has written hundreds of articles for dozens of publications and online communities dedicated to software development. He likes raisins and walnuts in his oatmeal cookies.