I had the kernel of this blog post a few weeks ago. The idea of the blog post grew and crystalized after viewing Dave Thomas’s presentation ‘The Death of Agile’. It is easily one of the best videos I have seen from an entertainment and educational point of view. I really love watching presentations from people who are simply excellent at presenting. It gives you the same pleasure as reading a book by an author who uses the english language effortlessly.
If you haven’t seen the presentation yet, you can view it at the following link.
The first part of the presentation is a tongue-in-cheek view of the past history of the business of Agile. It is a very humourous romp through history. Very entertaining and Dave is such a great presenter you really wonder if he is joking or not. It takes us to get to about the 15:00 mark until Dave lets us in on the joke.
There has been so much talk in Agile lately that unless you are doing some methods with no accommodation, you are not Agile. Not doing User Story Mapping? You are not Agile. Don’t have a true flow process in place? You are not Agile. Still Estimating? You are not Agile. Just doing iteration and mini-waterfalls? You are definitely not Agile and should do the walk of shame.
The hard part is all of us need to take the Agile Movement back from the precipice of being a noun and make it a verb once again. The Agile Manifesto understood this. Every principle had a continuum and action implied. They never said thou shalt never do Contract Negotiation again, but that we should move towards Customer Collaboration. Implied in that is that we should be always moving, improving, and adjusting.
In short, we need to take a noun and turn it back into a verb. Agile isn’t something to achieve. Agility is a state of mind about constant improvement no matter where you currently are. Some of us are in Texas and some of us are in France just based upon the context of our projects, teams. and clients. We should always seek to understand each other and help to coach them. But always respect where they are first.
This blog post came about by reading Mike Cohn’s blog – “An Interative Waterfall isn’t Agile“. Instead of judging each other we need to help each other and if some people have just made the step to Iterative Waterfall… well God Bless them..
Good article – I often have to battle dogmatic (pseudo) agile. People need to remember the meaning of the noun.
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