Agile is dead! Really?

Dave Thomas, one among the founders of agile manifesto says so in his post blog, “Agile is Dead (Long Live Agility)“. And lately I have seen a blog post “Agile is Dead, Long Live Continuous Delivery“. Is agile really die and need to be changed? Is Continuous Delivery a replacement of agile?

Background

In his blog post, Dave Thomas indeed say that the word “agile” need to be killed down. But why? That’s because the word “agile” and the “agile” concept has been misguided and become a tool, a process and being industrialized. As Dave said in his blog post:

Once the Manifesto became popular, the word agile became a magnet for anyone with points to espouse, hours to bill, or products to sell. It became a marketing term, coopted to improve sales in the same way that words such as eco and natural are. A word that is abused in this way becomes useless—it stops having meaning as it transitions into a brand.

Get it? The current “agile” is swayed from it’s original meaning and objective. It has become “marketing term”.

Agile is guidance, not methodology

Let’s see what we have at 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

The first point itself state that agile is not a methodology. The first point of manifesto states that you need to prefer to individuals and interactions over process and tools. If the agile you know focus to methodology and process, it already violates the first manifesto. Agile is just a guidance, to help you (and the team / company) to find the best process and tools for your development activity.

Even scrum, one of the most popular agile adaptation is still only a guidance or development framework. As stated,

“Langkah pertama yang perlu dilakukan untuk dapat memahami apa itu Scrum adalah dengan tidak mengaitkannya dengan sebuah metodologi apa pun juga karena Scrum hanya sebuah kerangka kerja dalam mengembangkan produk kompleks seperti software.” – Partogi, Joshua (2015) Manajemen Modern dengan Scrum, Yogyakarta, penerbit ANDI.

As translated: the first step that need to be done to able to understand what is Scrum is to not connect it with any methodology because Scrum is only a framework to develop complex product like software.

The marketing term agile / scrum

Today’s agile / scrum meaning varies and very misleading. The most popular misleading scrum is that it has “morning meeting” and “no documentation”. “If we have morning meeting, we already do agile”. It’s very misleading. The sole focus to process is already swayed away from agile manifesto.

Now let’s say that in your company you have one PM that manage 3 teams. Each team is doing project in different area. How can you do morning meeting with those setup? Evening e-mail daily reporting is enough for project tracking with those setup.

Continuous delivery is the next agile!

First, continuous delivery is not directly contradict with agile. Agile does not state that you need to develop a non-ready program. Moreover, agile state that you need to “responding to change over following a plan”, in which more or less is aligned with continuous delivery. And as stated above, agile is a guidance, not a methodology. We can say that continuous delivery is a more advanced implementation for agile.

Then it is the next agile! Hold on. As stated in agile manifesto, individuals and interactions over processes and tools, you cannot directly implement continuous delivery (CD) and hoping for everything to work well. You still need to consider the capability of team, servers, workflows, division, business decision. And the most important, the kind of software you make. CD relies heavily on good QA, test unit and continuous integration infrastructure. If you don’t have those matured, it’s risky to implement it.

Conclusion

Agile is not dead. It’s just that the term “agile” itself has swayed from it’s original meaning. It is a guidance and not methodology. It’s implementation may be evolved and improved. Continuous delivery is a good methodology and can align well with agile.