Agile Misunderstood

Why so emotional?

Last year, I was invited to deliver a talk on Agile. It was a nice experience for me, but I quickly forgot about it. Then, out of the blue, I recently started getting some questions regarding my talk. I couldn’t remember what exactly was I talking 12 months ago, so I had to go back and rewatch it.

After seeing the talk, and after also reading a number of posts on the tech media how “Agile is dead”, I decided to ask several of my friends and colleagues to give me their feedback on my talk.

Most people were nice enough to oblige, but I was not prepared for the emotional outpour from the ‘reviewers’. It seems that my talk has triggered wild emotions; I must have touched some sore spot, or some raw nerve in my talk, because the feedback was fierce.

Seems that quite a lot of people are highly irritated by the agile movement. I can easily relate to that, as I too am very irritated by what agile has become lately. Today, many organizations who profess to practice agile are only doing something that looks like a pale shadow of what agile was supposed to mean. I know that, because I was involved in a number of projects that were supposed to be done the agile way, but instead deteriorated to some SAFe chimera, a bastardized version of the agile movement.

However, it seems to me that some people’s grievances against agile are going much deeper than against the current bastardization. People seem have fundamental issues with the very core of agile thinking.

But before I address that phenomenon, I’d just like to quickly make a detour and mention how a lot of anti-agile sentiments seems to be directed at Scrum. Now, there isn’t anything in the agile movement that would connect it to Scrum. But for some reason, Scrum made its way into the agile process, and now we are witnessing teams doing sprints, and many other Scrum related ceremonies. I’ll be the first to add that all those ceremonies are absolutely not necessary when it comes to the agile way of working.

So, I would recommend to the agile critics to first do a bit of detoxification from Scrum. Once that is done, it will be easier to see forest for the trees, and to get to the bottom of what is it that is triggering them.

Another grievance I’ve heard regarding my talk is regarding the so-called “gated phases”. In my experience, whenever I was involved in non-agile projects, the work was always split into phases. The first phase was always requirements gathering, followed by the crafting of the product/system architecture, followed by the crafting of the product/system detailed design, followed by the detailed implementation plan. Then, the blueprint of the product/system got handed to the implementation team who would work on building the product/system from the blueprint/specifications.

Where are the gates there? Well, each time one phase gets completed and handed off to the crew responsible for the next phase, the gates to that previous phase would get closed. Meaning, the artifacts crafted by the crew working on that phase would get frozen. No more changes. Eventually the process reaches the “code freeze” gate, which means there will be no more changes to the code. All those phases and gates are typically managed by the Change Management Committee.

Looks like some of the anti-agile critics consider the above process unrealistic. Which is absolutely great, but it’s still not clear what is the alternative to agile then? Because agile is the exact opposite of the above described gated phases approach, if someone is claiming that gated phases approach is not what they’re doing, and yet they are adamantly against the agile approach, the question remains: what is their approach?

Why so emotional?

The thing that really puzzles me is the intensity of emotions that I have received from some of my reviewers. I mean, it’s to be expected that many people find agile to be a worthless flash in the pan, but if so, why such livid reaction to it?

If agile is really that insignificant and stupid, why not just let it slide? Why even bother going out of their way to let others know how much they dislike something that in their view is worthless and insignificant?

Also, why ad hominem? Some reviewers behave as if it was I who singlehandedly invented agile, and they felt it their appointed duty to ridicule me, to belittle my views, to call me names. All along I’m thinking “dude, those are not my ideas, those are not my words; why the vitriol, why such fierce emotional reaction? What is bothering you, who hurt you so much?”