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The State of Agile Software in 2018 (martinfowler.com)
On the surface, the world of agile software development is bright, since it is now mainstream. But the reality is troubling, because much of what is done is faux-agile, disregarding agile's values and principles, writes programmer Martin Fowler. The three main challenges we should focus on are: fighting the Agile Industrial Complex and its habit of imposing process upon teams, raising the importance of technical excellence, and organizing our teams around products (rather than projects), he added. An anonymous reader shares his post: Now agile is everywhere, it's popular, but there's been an important shift. It was summed up quite nicely by a colleague of mine who said, "In the old days when we talked about doing agile, there was always this pushback right from the beginning from a client, and that would bring out some important conversations that we would have. Now, they say, 'Oh, yeah, we're doing agile already,' but you go in there and you suddenly find there's some very big differences to what we expect to be doing. As ThoughtWorks, we like to think we're very deeply steeped in agile notions, and yet we're going to a company that says, "Yeah, we're doing agile, it's no problem," and we find a very different world to what we expect.
Our challenge at the moment isn't making agile a thing that people want to do, it's dealing with what I call faux-agile: agile that's just the name, but none of the practices and values in place. Ron Jeffries often refers to it as "Dark Agile," or specifically "Dark Scrum." This is actually even worse than just pretending to do agile, it's actively using the name "agile" against the basic principles of what we were trying to do, when we talked about doing this kind of work in the late 90s and at Snowbird. So that's our current battle. It's not about getting agile respectable enough to have a crowd like this come to a conference like this, it's realizing that a lot of what people are doing and calling agile, just isn't. We have to recognize that and fight against it because some people have said, "Oh, we're going to 'post-agile,' we've got to come up with some new word," - but that doesn't help the fundamental problem. It's the values and principles that count and we have to address and keep pushing those forwards and we might as well use the same label, but we've got to let people know what it really stands for.
Our challenge at the moment isn't making agile a thing that people want to do, it's dealing with what I call faux-agile: agile that's just the name, but none of the practices and values in place. Ron Jeffries often refers to it as "Dark Agile," or specifically "Dark Scrum." This is actually even worse than just pretending to do agile, it's actively using the name "agile" against the basic principles of what we were trying to do, when we talked about doing this kind of work in the late 90s and at Snowbird. So that's our current battle. It's not about getting agile respectable enough to have a crowd like this come to a conference like this, it's realizing that a lot of what people are doing and calling agile, just isn't. We have to recognize that and fight against it because some people have said, "Oh, we're going to 'post-agile,' we've got to come up with some new word," - but that doesn't help the fundamental problem. It's the values and principles that count and we have to address and keep pushing those forwards and we might as well use the same label, but we've got to let people know what it really stands for.
“We are an Agile shop”: Your expected standard work week will be 80 hours
“We are a Post-Agile shop”: Your expected standard work week will be 95 hours
“We believe in work-life balance”: You’ll be required to wear a beeper whenever you’re not in the office
#DeleteChrome
...its pervasiveness.
It's a valuable tool IN A TOOLBOX.
If you're NOT an ISV, and you make software solutions for individual customers (which is what the vast majority of software developers find themselves doing) - then Agile is probably the right way for your company to go.
If you ARE an ISV (and Independent Software Vendor makes products, unlike the folks above who work on PROJECTS) then use Agile at your peril.
ISVs that use agile are those that tend to have "Product Managers" who are not actually Product Managers, but are instead "Project Managers" with a penchant for making products up out of virtually thin air ("Oh, a customer wants this, so this must be part of the 'product.')
ISVs that know what they are doing start with Product Managers - because a Product Manager has DOMAIN EXPERTISE that means they actually know what the market wants - not just a single customer. The problem for wanna-be ISVs is that real Product Managers are expensive and difficult to find (but they're out there) due to the Product Management market being swamped with Project Managers calling themselves Product Managers.
If your company has a technology or product related vision - you should not use Agile.
If your company has a market dominance or growth related vision, and you make software tailored to a specific customer's needs - you should probably use Agile.
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Just the latest management fad in a long line of management fads,
Agile will soon be enhanced to create Freestyle Recursive Agile Software Development, known by its short form, Fragile.
Similarly, the imprecision of integer DevOps will be improved by implementing floating point operations, to gift us DevFlops.
watch as we wave away criticism of our touted silver bullet.
watch as we wave away criticism of our touted Bitcoin bullet!
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
At some point it becomes necessary to behead all the architects and begin construction.
-- Abi-Bar-Shim (Project Mgr. - Great Pyramid)
Have gnu, will travel.