I can’t remember how many times have I heard a word Agile during recent years. We’re agile. We’re doing agile. We’re introducing agile.
It sounds like people dialogues in the kitchen. Yes, I’m going to the gym. Sure, I do cardio. Yeah, I do Crossfit. Of course, I consume supplements. Aero? Every week.
But somehow I can’t see the muscle grow.
The results of this supposed agility I can’t see as well. There used to be chaos and it still is. Estimations have been poor and they still are. The technical debt balance looks like the credit card of a young adult after the summer weekend. Deadlines are scary like cancer and deployments as painful as colonoscopy. And last but not least – the scope is still not flexible at all. But we’re agile!
Are we?
The worst failure of Agile is I believe its promise it can be modified and adjusted. Therefore let’s come back to the analogy of a gym. We are growing muscles. But we don’t take care of the diet because we like to eat. We don’t train our legs because on Fridays we go to the party. We don’t go to the gym when we have a headache.
Then we visit a gym for two years and we still are somehow ashamed owners of a beer belly instead of rock-solid ABS.
Can we be agile if we have a fixed scope? Can we deploy at the end of each sprint if we don’t have the whole organization prepared for it? Can we build better software without showing the client a new version at each iteration? Can we be agile if there’s no client yet, only the budget?
Maybe yes, maybe no.
But for sure if we will modify or remove half of the rules from Agile recommendations we will achieve mess, not benefits. So let’s be serious, responsible developers and not be tempted to eat a cookie when we’re on diet. We can’t eat a cookie and still have it.