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Comment by einrealist | Hacker News Reader

"Agile is Dead" is like saying: Life sucks.

Agile is a phenomenon with lots of different manifestations that try to do their best at embracing the Agile Manifesto. Yes there is hype and people who make money of it. But that hype is justified by many examples of successful Agile manifestations.

Most important to Agile is to get it. To get into the mindset of feedback loops and collaboration. For larger companies with "non-Agile" habits, that is hard by default.

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I hope 'Agile', as a product, with the capital A, that sells lots of worthless pulp fiction "how to" books, with dogmatic consultants propagating useless practices they neither understand nor can follow, well I hope that is dead. It was and is a cancer on the industry as a whole.

I however hope 'agile' as a spirit of talking to your users, breaking down tasks into bite size deliverables, testing, and making sure things move in a generally agreeable direction, well, I hope that persists and flourishes.

Yes! Agile with a small 'a' is something I talk about at work too often. I don't want to be "Agile" but rather "agile" as in the definition of the word, "able to move quickly and easily."

Agreed. It's interesting because we all know branding aside, feedback, frquent builds, communication is something you can't deny is a good thing. But it's not unfortunately hard to decouple enthusiasm for agile from a perception of zealotry.

Those who say "agile is dead" are those that think agile was something you had to buy in the first place. To me agile has always just been a way of thinking about solutions to problems. It can't 'die' because it ideas have already been absorbed into our collective consciousness and affects the way we create solutions. Even if no one calls it agile anymore, the mark has been made.

The problem is that agile mindset was sold like a product and those that bought it never took into account the cultural change that organizations have to make to make "agile" work.

Let's just call that Quality and make things in good ways.

Go back to W. Edwards Deming—understand your customers, understand your company and your people, manage with respect and based on science and psychology, and base decisions on the reality of your systems and customers, rather than fantasy goals or objectives.

I think agile is mainly about a common language, contract or understanding between the developer(s) and their customer(s). Before, customers used to negotiate a finished product without taking all the risks involved in specification changing.

But also, agile is dead.

Long live Agile?

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