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Andy Hunt - one of the originators of the Agile Manifesto, and NOT your humble submitter - has concluded that Agile has lost its way:
in the 14 years since then, we‘ve lost our way. The word “agile” has become sloganized; meaningless at best, jingoist at worst. We have large swaths of people doing “flacid agile,” a half-hearted attempt at following a few select software development practices, poorly. We have scads of vocal agile zealots—as per the definition that a zealot is one who redoubles their effort after they've forgotten their aim.
And worst of all, agile methods themselves have not been agile. Now there‘s an irony for you.
How did we get into this mess?
The basis of an agile approach is to embrace change; to be aware of changes to the product under development, the needs and wishes of the users, the environment, the competition, the market, the technology; all of these can be volatile fountains of change. To embrace the flood of changes, agile methods advise us to “inspect and adapt.” That is, to figure out what‘s changed and adapt to it by changing our methods, refactoring our code, collaborating with our customers, and so on. But most agile adopters simply can‘t do that, for a very good reason. When you are first learning a new skill—a new programming language, or a new technique, or a new development method—you do not yet have the experience, mental models, or ability to handle an abstract concept such as “inspect and adapt.” Those abilities are only present in practitioners with much more experience, at higher skill levels
Andy also has some thoughts on how to correct this - starting with the idea that Agile methodologies must be applied to Agile methodologies, to allow them to adapt to changing needs.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by bradley13 on Saturday May 09 2015, @06:03AM
History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme. For agile development, the terminology is different, the way you move tasks around on the pinboard is different, but the principle is iterative development, not really different from the way good teams were doing it 30 years ago.
If you want a successful project, you need: (a) a good project manager to handle requirements and deal with the customer, (b) a good software architect and (c) a competent programmers. The team must follow some software development methodology - it doesn't much matter which. If you have those three ingredients, agile works a treat. Guess what, so does waterfall, if your project isn't too big; if it is, then your project manager and your architect will insist on iterations anyway.
Agile was "cool" for a while; some teams got good results out of it. Not so much because of the agile methodology, but because they were good teams, working well together. Now agile has been adopted by the PHBs and forced onto teams missing one or more of the three essential ingredients. Those teams fail, and would have failed with any other methodology as well.
Time for the next trend. I know, let's emphasize data modelling this time. Or maybe GUI mockups. Build up a methodology wrapped around some other practice that good software engineers do anyway, but with new terminology. We can sell it to the next generation of programmers as something completely new, sell lots of books and make lots of money consulting about it.
Damn, cynical this morning. Get off my lawn.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.