Do Agile and be agile

There is agile and there is Agile

One is an adjective and the other is a proper noun.

agile  adj /ˈædʒaɪl/: able to move about quickly and easily; able to think, understand and respond quickly

In business terms, agile refers to dealing with new situations or changes quickly and successfully. And for people dwelling in software craftmanship, it means your mindset and behaviors are inspired by the 4 values and 12 principles stated in the 2001 Agile Manifesto.

• Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
• Working software over comprehensive documentation
• Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
• Responding to change over following a plan

For example, if the requirement changes midway through a development process, it should be accommodated, perhaps not in the current iteration but in the next. Because the agile mindset believes in collaboration and responding to change over a strict plan no longer reflecting reality.

Note that no place in the manifesto dictates what you need to do to be agile. If a dozen of people who all share this set of values come together and start building software, fat chances are that they will agree on the general direction where they should be going but fight each other at every turn on the fine details. It is because the manifesto is literally a set of loosely defined beliefs. It lacks all the trademarks of the software development process we have grown accustomed to: iterative development, sprint planning, feature backlog, a small amount of WIP, etc.

That is where big 'A' Agile comes in. An Agile process is a methodology, a clearly defined system of practices, whose principles are consistent with the manifesto. There are different flavors of Agile process, the big 4 are: Scrum, Kanban, Extreme Programming, and Lean Software Development (ordered by popularity, judged by myself). What they all have in common is that they take the 4 values and 12 principles and derive a framework encompassing the entire life cycle of software development, from the first seed of an idea to production release. Each of the practices in these frameworks is useful in its own right, but together they are greater than the sum of the parts. They embrace each other and create greater values. Take a humble burndown chart for example, it illustrates a project's progress toward the finish line, but it embraces story point estimation (which is the unit of the chart), user story writing (each story delivers a piece of independent value, and can be released on its own right), and minimize WIP (stories can be tested and accepted as soon as the implementation is done).

src: http://scrumbook.org.datasenter.no/

In the same way constitution and law work, small 'a' agile is inspiring but Agile is what brings people together and allows them to collaborate somewhat efficiently. You are agile and do Agile. Agile was the best thing happening in software development... 20 years ago.

What happened in the last 20 years?

Big 'A' Agile became a victim of its own success. Agile started as a small movement among software development enthusiasts and gained so much traction that it became an industry on its own in which everyone wants a piece. The following awesome map demonstrates how the small movement became a conglomerate of management processes.

There are so many Agile flavors now, I mean, look at the map, that when one claims to do Agile in one form or another, and everyone does, she might as well not say anything at all. To do Agile used to mean the development process follows a certain distinguishable pattern, today it is the equivalent of saying I am breathing.

One more, look at the top left corner of the map, it was made by a consultant. Deloitte, McKinsey, BCG, Scrum Alliance, and a nameless army of certified scrum masters and their dogs have turned Agile adoption into a consulting industry. To ensure their own values and usefulness, these consultants, consciously or not, are the reasons why there are so many Agile flavors, so convoluted, and foreign to even software development professionals. It is believed that was the same reason why religious rites are complicated and foreign to the majority of the population, the priestly people needed to demonstrate their "usefulness". 

Agile under the influence of a profit-seeking industry has been reduced to an empty shell of its former idealization.

FOMO and forceful adoption, many companies now do Agile as if it is just another checkbox in a list. People do Agile while refusing to be agile, they follow the practices mindlessly. We write stories that can't be released on their own, a cluster of stories needs to be deployed and rolled back together. Every 2 weeks we do a Sprint planning but keep both deadlines and scopes, no sign of flexibility is observed. The retrospective meeting is either skipped or used as a gossip forum without improving the working environment or process. 

I have been ranting like agile was pure and good and Agile got spoiled by human greed. But that is not all of it.

The design faults of agile and where we are heading post-agile is a topic I would like to explore in a future article. But look, created some 20 years ago, Agile was made in a world different from the one we are living in today. Back then software was less complicated, written by a smaller team, and managers were unfamiliar with software development hence the need to continuously demo and showcase.

Agile believes collaboration between builders is the key to successful working software and looks down on heavy investment in processes and documents. But as team size gets bigger, complete collaboration also gets expensive. As in, it takes a lot of time if we insist there is no big design phase and the best design is the one emerging during the implementation process. We want to look down on documentation because it is an artifact of bureaucracy but documents make a project long-term maintainable and allow different teams to work with each other, not working software. The world post-pandemic also sees a rise in decentralized teams, collaboration without documents in that context is simply not making the most out of the setting. And we think contracts do nothing good but promote constraints, yet nobody bats an eye at service contract.

It has been a long way to say that in 2023, Agile is not dead but it is less relevant than what it used to be. Seems like agile, as in the set of values and principles captured in the manifesto, shares the same fate despite its lingo difference. And that is the way things should be. In a world that keeps changing, change is the only constant.