Steven Willems

If you’re following twitter or reading some blog RSS feeds, you’ve probably noticed the Agile Manifesto had a little birthday party, it became 10.

The question is however, is there still a reason to celebrate? ….Yes and No.

Yes, because the Agile Movement that was started by a few anarchists made it to the de facto standard in software development country. A major part in our business says they are doing it, are adopting it or are considering the big jump towards it.

No, because everyone is doing it, is adopting it or is considering to make the big jump. Uhm, isn’t that a paradox? Nope. Reading the same RSS feeds and tweets, one can feel the pain of the anarchists of ten years ago when they look at what happened with their Agile Movement. Reading this article of ten years ago again, you might understand why. As it is well explained in this blog by William Pietri a lot of the agilists out there have missed the point completely. The industry picked up the Agile idea and before knowing well what it is all about, the Agile word became the next buzz word on the block, resulting in being a victim of its own popularity.

Then the Craftsmanship movement came along to act as a counterweight against the failing agilists. Again, the ideas of the movement are rock solid and to the point, finger pointing the spots where the want-to-be-agilists fail. But again, the danger to be adopted by the mass industry lies behind every corner. How could one be against doing the best you can day after day? How could one advocate not to test as much as possible? How could one say not trying to involve his client as much in the project to achieve the best productivity and product value as possible?

My point is, once marketing and the money will discover it, it will be doomed as well. Unless, unless the craftsmanship movement can keep its anarchistic nature. Unless it can stay underground and irritate the would-be-agilists, reminding them what is all about day after day. Asking them constantly why we have a failing build for 25 days in a row. Why our scrum board is full of clutter and why it takes all this time to manage it? Why the documentation is so scarce? Why we are pairing day after day, even for the simplest tasks (because XP says you have to ?) Why the stand up meetings take more than a few minutes? Why the code quality is so poor and nobody is seeing it? Why you have no metrics telling you the quality of your code? Why retrospectives feel like meetings you have to attend because you have to, but whatever the resulting actions are, nothing is going to change? Why is one developing on the worst possible machines out there and that are even more ruined by security rules and virus scanners so one is looking at the damn hourglass pointer for the major part of his days? Why is the client not more involved? Oh, he is.. right, a lot of people are involved analyzing the stuff we have to develop. But how about returning their stuff back to sender when it’s crap and getting the developers involved as soon as possible. And please skip the shitty unprepared meetings resulting in more questions than before! And what about the communication gap? Why does the team not feel like a team?? Why do we need a complete sidetrack team to reorganize our code in a different architecture – will it improve quality / development time (interesting article)?

Is all that being Agile ?

These are only a few questions that come to my mind when I think of some projects I worked/I’m working on. But being a true professional, maybe I shouldn’t be writing this. It’s easy to find out what projects/firms I’m talking about. But maybe, being that same professional, I should be writing this. Maybe it starts the discussion again. I don’t mind being wrong and having to admit so, as long it keeps everybody sharp.
I just can’t live with the idea working for a company that claims to be one of those ultra agilists around in my country, while they simply are not. To be fair, they come closer than the most out there, but unfortunately, no cigar.

And to finish this post, an interesting thought: my first project, which had waterfall project management written all over the place, just might have been more agile than the project I’m doing right now.