Happy 25th Anniversary, Agile

Agile just turned 25 years old! It’s hard to believe that it’s a quarter of a century since the Manifesto for Agile Software Development was created, and yet some people still view it as too new or unproven for their organisation.

For a document so brief, it still surprises me when people misinterpret it. But then, I think, it’s because we are often driven to start with the practices (e.g. do daily stand ups) without understanding why… and, of course, if you don’t understand the purpose, you can’t find better ways of achieving the same goal or even know if that particular approach is even applicable. But hey, someone gets to put a tick in a box that says “we’re doing agile”.

Maybe I’m the odd one out because I like to understand the fundamentals, to know whether we’re trying to answer the right problem. I’ve been doing this long enough to know there’s rarely a single “right way” to do something, and that standardisation usually means forcing all the square and triangular pegs into a round hole, often having to adopt the lowest common denominator.

If we don’t agree that software development is complicated (often complex) and that we need to keep “uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others do it”, then we’re all about to be replaced by AI, or worse a small shell script.