The State of Agile Software in 2018

I originally discovered this via a link on Dave Rupert’s blog—along with his relatable commentary:

Whenever I read the original Agile Manifesto and it’s accompanying Twelve Principles, my soul leaps! But in practice inside enterprise Agile frameworks, my soul is often left crushed...In my experience, there seems to be a strongly held belief that if you obey certain rituals: have certain meetings, say certain words, pray certain prayers, commit to improbable deadlines; your product will enter the Promise Land. It’s hard for me to rectify what I know about software development with this religion. I have resigned myself to being an apostate.

However, I didn’t get around to listening to the source video until recently. It’s fantastic. The speaker is Martin Fowler, one of the original signers of the Agile Manifesto. The fact that he basically calls apostasy on what most of us likely participate in as the de-facto, day-to-day, shared implementation of agile, is striking.

with so many differences, how can we say there is one way that will work for everybody? We can’t. And yet what I’m hearing so much...is imposing methods upon people. That to me is a travesty.

Even the agile advocates wouldn’t say that agile is necessarily the best thing to use everywhere. The point is: the team doing the work gets to decide how to do it. That is a fundamental agile principle, which means that if a team doesn’t want to work in an agile-way, then agile probably isn’t appropriate in that context. And that is the most agile-way of doing things.

I can’t help be nod my head in agreement with Dave’s summary: “Fowler’s perspective and patience with the Agile Industrial Complex gives me a foothold to keep from falling into hopelessness.”