Under this title - which I know is provocative - I would like to talk about all the claims I hear around me from acquaintances I respect about a return to “agile fundamentals”, implying engineering practices (pure and hard), also implying against this masquerade agile of which they make Scrum the standard bearer.
Despite all the respect and friendship I have for them, on this point, in my opinion, they’re mistaken.
I understand their dismay, however.
Agile (and Scrum),
it’s the buzzword. And as Comte-Sponville writes: “when fashion gets involved, it ordinarily comes at the cost of a certain number of confusions”. This is what’s happening to us with “agile”. The twenty pages of the booklet on Jeff Sutherland’s scrum.org site that allow one to grasp the subject and play at being sorcerer’s apprentices.
For these comrades with very technical profiles or desires (in the very noble sense of the term, besides I don’t know any other sense) one way to bring these lost sheep back to reason is to raise the “entry ticket” price for agile. By recalling all the technical know-how necessary for the proper execution of an agile project (extreme programming, or craftsmanship). Hence also the fatwa against Scrum which allows one to say that one is doing agile without even writing code. Which allows everyone to get started (often any which way). Imagine Kanban…
If I think they’re mistaken, it’s because I believe their response is too reductive, and that they’re targeting the wrong thing. Otherwise what they’re saying isn’t false, and what’s more, very interesting. They have the right question, but the wrong answer, or a very incomplete answer.
Their response is too reductive: by wanting to bring the foundations of agile back to a software approach for the developer, they restrict themselves to one agile movement among others, neither the first, nor the last, nor the foundation, nor the ultimate goal. Agile cannot be reduced to a single movement. It’s a philosophy, or *movements* of thought constituted by several branches, several schools with intersections, overlaps, bifurcations, etc. I understand in any case the care they take in wanting to ennoble the developer, it’s a role rarely valued at its true worth (whose fault is that: that’s another debate).
They’re targeting the wrong thing by aiming at Scrum. If Scrum is working so well where extreme Programming failed, they should wonder why. For my part, I envision in a software project that the two are more than complementary, that they are inseparable. When XPers explain that XP already has everything (implying all the good practices), I wonder again: why then a failure a few years earlier (failure in the sense that it didn’t experience the same success as Scrum)? Probably because this “everything” is poorly expressed for the majority of audiences (the term “retrospective”, the expression “definition of done” is scrum, even if it exists in a different way in XP). The content of XP is also in my opinion poorly balanced (Extreme…). So they’re targeting the wrong thing in my opinion. They’re going around the problem instead of dealing with it. Dealing with it means communicating better, better understanding or compensating for the difficulties generated by scrum’s “entry ticket”. Better explaining the strong relationships between these two approaches and the numerous points of convergence, reformulating them if needed, etc.
No false quarrel
I completely agree with their analysis and I support their action: the entry ticket for Scrum is a weakness (but I add that it’s also a strength). Yes, they’re right to highlight all the benefits and the necessity in the IT context of Extreme programming or Craftsmanship practices. Yes, agile in many cases has been distorted (but not in many other cases).
But I would rather say: we’re suffering from agile’s success. Good for us, but we must redouble our efforts. Yes, everyone fears the “backlash” from too much distortion and therefore misunderstanding of agile. But who are we to set ourselves up as temple guardians? I think of agile as a philosophy or a state of mind. It therefore in no way belongs to a small number.
Finally, writing (as I’ve been able to read) “agile is dead” is for me just an admission of failure or powerlessness. The criticism is too easy. Be more constructive. Be agile, then.
I thank you for reading these few lines (I Thank You a cover of Sam & Dave by the bearded ones on their best album, Degüello)