We put more value in agile than we could ever possibly gain from it.
Agile started as a lightweight development methodology to compete with waterfall.
What is it now? It’s everything and everywhere.
I have no data to back this up —- only anecdata, but it appears to me as if we place more value in what we want agile to be than what it is.
We want it to be the solution to building software. Is it? Empirically?
The answer is empirically “no”, and like any good defense, when an agile project fails, we look for the True Scotsman. “No one who really followed agile would have tracked story points” or some such.
While this is maybe a little bit a comdemnation, our current situation is, at its core, remarkable, that is, worthy of remark.
Software is maybe 60 years old, certainly as a commercial industry younger than that. We are still very much in our infancy in figuring out how to build software reliably. Software runs the world, and any mistake has an outweighted value over the fact that just 60 years ago we would never have bet that self driving cars would be a reality.
We’ve moved pretty quickly for not knowing what the heck we are doing, and I believe there is value in figuring out how to build software better. Is agile it? No. But it’s been an improvement over what came before it.
What’s after agile?