The rise and flourishing of Agile

November 22, 2008 by Artem Marchenko

Picture courtesy of tommoka@Flickr

The article discusses the qualitative change in the way people apply Agile methods nowadays comparing to the past. Earlier people were asking coaches for learning Agile from scratch, were taking the complete XP or real Scrum package and were happy. Nowadays they install the basics of Scrum themselves usually taking into use just backlogs and stories, fail to get on the engineering practices, shared workspaces and the all important Deming’s Plan-Do-Check-Act (PDCA) cycle, struggle and, well, sometimes blame Agile for their pain. So is such contemporary Agile bad?

Well, yes and no. When more people start going to gym and do just their preferred exercises instead of preparing a program with the help of a coach and proper measurements, is it good or bad? In most of the cases these people will become healthier, than they were while doing just minor stretching at home. Sometimes they might get problems related to the unbalanced muscle development. For some of them the act of being in the gym and maybe this unbalanced muscle development will, however, draw attention to what other people do in the gym, maybe they'll look for a program on the web, or hire a coach. That might be too late, the people might miss the biggest benefits and some will just do the favorite hand exercises forever even if their legs can barely deliver them to the gym. However, majority of people will become at least a bit healthier.

To me the analogy to agile is rather straightforward. Agile has crossed the chasm indeed. The most guys trying agile nowadays are no early adopters willing to get all the benefits and carefully reading books. For those misapplying Scrum it might take a lot of time to get on the fully fledged Agile and some might never get there. So what, should they stay doing cowboy coding or waterfall despite the biggest ever market turbulence? Or should they wait until they learn enough to understand their real needs and hire a coach? I believe that frequent and reliable replanning, rapid cycles are good, not bad. The more companies try them, the more will find their way to making it also sustainable, dive into PDCA and improve greatly.

Nowadays I spend more time practicing SW development, than coaching different teams, however I stay in contact with huge amount of teams adopting Agile. Very rarely I hear that Scrum made them fail. At most I hear that people don't like Scrum much, but they don't like the idea of going back even more.

The fact that more companies are pursuing the direction is not a fall of Agile, but the rise of it. Every next round of new ideas in software development makes us better. There clearly will be the next hype and the next idea that will make us all even better (Lean to be the next hype, anyone?). Meanwhile the majority will get the small, but benefits of the current topic.

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