Saying Goodbye to Agile
lewiscampbell.tech
lewiscampbell.tech
i have no doubt that places were practicing waterfall in the large. people running businesses, both vendor and client, want 'predictable' estimates up front, with a single timeframe, and single quote
but i suspect internally projects followed an iterative process, where designs were refined repeatedly and testing happened early. because you had to
unfortunately, those projects were still judged by a waterfall yardstick, with inflating timescales and bills, giving something for agile to attack
and on first blush, agile, the manifesto, sounds reasonable enough
but, after 30-40 years of practice to reflect upon, agile:
- has some good parts that were already well documented, i.e royce and brooks
- some radical parts of dubious general applicability and benefit
- just enough ambiguity that we have since been arguing what true agile really is
and this is what prevents it from ever really working or being the basis to solidify an engineering field around
it helped us get some of the way there but it won't help us get further and it's time to let it die
You suspect wrong.
It was comprehensive documentation upfront, then development. Iteration did occur because, of course as soon as you actually start development you also start finding issues with your comprehensive documentation, so you deviate from the documentation and need to follow the process to update it...
It is difficult to take the blog seriously when the author claims that the Agile manifesto is "near devoid of meaning". The manifesto has a lot of meaning and sound principles stemming from experience, but it only describes principles not a step by step process to follow to implement them (which is where things went all over the place). Whether this 'wisdom' was new or not at the time the manifesto was written is quite irrelevant.
"And no one serious doubted the effectiveness of requirements and specifications" (quote from the blog): And Agile does not either.
I don't think that AI changes anything to the Agile principles that remain relevvant. AI is just a new tool.
You need a "spec" to feed to AI for it to produce code but that is completely orthogonal to Agile.
"Agile told us "Working software over comprehensive documentation". Spec-Driven Development is telling us "Comprehensive documentation creates working software"."
That misunderstanding what Agile meant, and also repeating the mistake that "comprehensive documentation" upfront is desirable or even achievable.
"and put Agile in the dustbin of history where it belongs."
At that point I am hoping that this was a satirical blog not to be taken seriously.