Agile Is Dead, McKinsey Just Killed It
In my experience, the term “Agile” itself has been so widely applied that it lost any useful meaning it might have had a long time ago. The ideas it prompted are the interesting part.<p>I’ve never fully agreed with the original Agile Manifesto anyway, mostly because I think it tries to separate concepts that aren’t independent in practice. For example, if you don’t have a comprehensive requirements spec, how can you possibly know whether you have working software?<p>I do think the early Agile advocacy served a useful purpose in highlighting how slow and heavy a lot of software development processes were at the time. I think a lot of good ideas have been popularised as a result of that awareness and the various alternative processes that have been tried as a result. I also think some not so good ideas have been popularised, and some ideas that work well in the right context but not universally.<p>IMHO, it is much more interesting to discuss those specific ideas. How can we build software more incrementally, so we can see real progress and identify any potential problems earlier when they might be easier to fix? Is there a risk of becoming <i>too</i> short-sighted, so we create an illusion of progress, yet overall it takes longer to build a product we can ship? How can we organise our code and our teams to be more adaptable as requirements evolve over time? How does our situation change depending on whether we’re building a line-of-business web application, a game for a next generation console, or the management system for an aircraft carrier? There are lots of interesting ideas and useful discussions to be had, but they can be had just as well without applying the loaded term “Agile” anywhere.