There's an interesting phenomenon that Agile (capital A) has exposed me to, and once I saw it due to Agile I've seen parallels elsewhere.
In that: if it fails, it is only considered evidence that you were not doing it enough.
The solution can never be at fault, it's your execution, or your devotion to the process (in this case) that was faulty.
It's also true for Cloud providers; that they're not suited for certain tasks is no longer considered an engineering trade-off, it's that you architected your solution wrong, and the answer is to buy even more into how the platform works.
If your microservices become slow or difficult to debug, it's never that fatter services could have been preferable, it's that we didn't go hard-enough into microservices.
If Austerity is not working as an economic model; the answer isn't to invest in growth, it's to cut even more corners.
My favorite Agile-ism is when Agile is defined as “the process that works for the team”.
If a team adopts agile (in any variation) and doesn’t like it, the Agile defenders will appear and argue that the team wasn’t actually doing agile. Agile is defined as the process that works, so if it didn’t work it couldn’t have been agile. If only you read The Agile Manifesto you would understand!
> My favorite Agile-ism is when Agile is defined as “the process that works for the team”.
What compels you to believe it isn't?
I mean, read the Agile Manifesto. All it does is basically define a set of values and principles. Things like "customer comes first" or "we welcome changes in requirements" or "software must be delivered frequently".
What leads you to believe Agile implies a fixed set of precise, rigid rules?
The problem is a disconnect between management and those who build.
My thoughts when PE forced Agile on my employer were dismissed as "you're the technical expert, we're the process experts".
As someone without decision power, you read words of empowerment but your reality is a different one, and you're left resolving that dissonance on your own (quietly, otherwise you get pushed aside).
It isnt but the fact it ultra vague and hand wavey means anybody can claim anything they do is agile including things that the exact opposite.
I actually think OP's criticisms apply mostly to Scrum. Scrum is well defined but its adherents' wont hear a critical word said about it. "You just werent doing it right" even when you were doing it precisely as described.
I suspect there might not be love for this angle here, but there's something else that follows this format: God. Spirituality. Religion.
I'm not religious is any traditional sense, but I'd argue that it's not always the hallmark of a bad dynamic when a system always asks of you to do inner work when failures happen in contact with the real world. Sometimes that's a healthier mode than the alternative -- externalizing the blame, and blaming the system (or the god).
I suspect there a very abstract game theoretic conversation that could be had about this :)
when it comes to some diets, some only work if you follow them wholeheartedly, like meat only diet, one speck of peppar might be enough to cause an inflammation. But generally you can't take a process that worked well for another person or company and apply it on you or your company. Like for example a training program, you can't just take a training program from a professional athlete and reuse it on your kid and expect him/her to become as good as the pro. Programs and processes are very individual tailored.
A process that fails when you slightly diverge is process that fails. Because all human orgs diverge from stated process here or there. Including army which puts huge amounts of resources into making people comply with everything.
> I suspect there might not be love for this angle here, but there's something else that follows this format: God. Spirituality. Religion.
Yes, and that's because God, spirituality and religion make fuzzy truth claims and can be used to argue for and justify anything. God can be used as the excuse to start a genocide and the inspiration to stop it, spirituality can be the way for wounded people to work with their trauma and the vehicle for people without scruples to sell horoscopes or some shit, religion (the same religion) was used to justify and uphold slavery and to fight for its end.
They are containers for our politics, our lifestyle, for who we are and for who we hope to be.
The Agile manifesto is a series of statements in the form "we like X more than Y." It doesn't say anything. To make it mean anything you have to project onto it a framework of interpretation that exists independently of the "sacred text" itself.
So yeah, they are similar, and that's because Agile, sociologically, works like a religion.
It's usually because your company doesn't fundamentally want it. You cannot have roadmaps with lists of features that you advertise to customers AND have the flexibility to decide to ignore things that turn out to be useless or disporportionately time consuming.
If someone handed you a plan for making a jet engine and you messed around with the instructions ... why would you expect it to work? If you have a bug because there are not enough tests ... you write more tests don't you? Why would a method be forgiving when compilers and reality itself aren't?
But that isn't evidence that the method works. If you're a native tribe, that has an ancient traditional rain dance, it is invoked whenever there is a drought. Sometimes it rains shortly after the dance is performed. But if it doesn't rain, it's not proof that you danced poorly, it's evidence that you didn't understand the situation fully or properly. The instructions or "wisdom" you relied on, didn't actually capture something useful.
My evidence is that I was on a team that was not overly controlled by management and had clever people in it without any instant attitudes of rejection so they adapted to it. We produced updates bi-weekly and we had a huge backlog of stupid features which we were never going to get round to - we were able to get the important things done and it was one of the best feelings I've ever had about work.
Since then I've been on teams with any number of pathologies. From developers it is sometimes the desired to be special - those ones who want to work on their bit of the code and not let anyone else touch it. From managers it's things like forcing the way stories are split so that they're always too large and can never fit into a sprint - because they think that everything must be a "user visible change". Management types also sit in retrospectives and use them to crap on everyone. Product managers demand features which they don't know will really interest customers and are inflexible about them - they want "everything" just in case and that delays the work and deletes any chance of a feedback loop.
The good agile feeling came from being able to have control and be successful. When it's messed up, you're out of control and cannot avert disasters. Whatever method you want to call it, I think we need to feel we're in control enough to succeed.
What is the chance that you've perfectly captured every aspect of the situation that led to success? Versus, what is the chance that you were lucky enough to be in situations where a multitude of factors, both appreciated and unappreciated, combined to lead to success?
There are a million possible reasons for failure, but here is a very easy one: It doesn't matter how good you feel about the development process, if the company has the wrong objective. You will still end up being frustrated, and failing. Of course this will have all sorts of pathological and uncomfortable ramifications.
So while it is easy to say, "just act this way and you'll have success". You're not actually appreciating all the hidden elements that allow any hope of acting that way. You've been lucky enough to be in situations where it happened to work (ie. the rain dance made rain), but that does not mean it's actually representative, or that the prescription actually captures the critical information needed to ensure success for other people. Instead, you've described a rain dance.
You're right - there isn't one way to do things or one way that always works. There are issues that are outside a team's control, for example, that make it an impossible struggle. If you're rigidly forced to do something and cannot adapt then you're ... not really agile. But you have to understand why you're doing what you're doing and keep adjusting to see what works for you.
#1 IMO is that if the company you're in is non-agile in its general attitude, which is influenced by its own customers, then everything is geared against you.
That isn't to say that something like Kanban might not be usable or better than no plan at all but certainly scrum is not some universal solution.
Which also conveniently makes you spend more money on tokens.
With agile, at least no one was charging you for it. Like sure, there’s a cost to the process. But there wasn’t direct agile.com profiting from you.
Meanwhile agentic workflows every solution to the problem is giving more money to the ai companies.
Model is bad? Made more expensive model. Still bad? Here’s an infrastructure that reads huge text files again and again making you consume tokens. Still bad? Here’s a way to easily spin up multiple agents at once so you can delegate work. Still bad? Here’s a new service that will automatically review code. Still bad? Maybe a biggger more expensive model will help.
>> With agile, at least no one was charging you for it.
Depends. There are companies [1] making loads of money out of it. Charging for certification and imposing the idea that either you are certified, or you are going to fail. They are even eating the lunch of PMI, as PMI (PMBoK) is turning into an Agile manual.
Where I work is being expended literally millions per year in Agile.
If it's an internet-required smarthammer without a handle that instead hits out on voice prompt, sometimes without enough or with too much force, sometimes knocks the nail out of the way and punches a hole, and sometimes hits you in the face, then yeah
Yes, but on the other hand, there's
https://www.reddit.com/r/ididnthaveeggs/, which collects cases of home cooks making inadvisable recipe substitutions and then complaining to the recipe creators that the resulting dish tasted bad. Sometimes there are essential ingredients and skipping them or replacing them with something else makes success impossible.
An appealing analogy but recipes have defined testable outcomes. You know what a Victoria sponge is supposed to look like (there's probably even a picture of one in the book). You can perfectly evaluate when a substitute has ruined it.
Agile doesn't have that, there is no functional equivelant of "the cake should be moist and rise evenly". What does "Agile" adoption look like? Faster delivery? Happier Developers? More revenue? Fewer bugs? This is never defined up front and they shift depending on the person being asked. This means you can never actually determine if someone "left out an essential ingredient".
The irony is that Agiles own favoured development practice (TDD) cannot be applied to Agile itself. There is no acceptance test for the process, you can't iterate on something that isn't measured and has no defined outcome.
/r/ididnthaveeggs works because everyone agrees on what the dish should have been.
I mean, Switzerland and North Korea both call themselves democracies but the specifics matter. The specifics matter!
These discussions are always fascinating in a sort of baffling way to me because I've only had great experiences with what I call agile. Like, you bring it into the team and within months everyone is gushing about how much better life is now. Yet threads like this one are full of people reporting awful experiences.
Apparently whatever it is they're doing involves a lot of meetings and little actual flexibility? The deeply unexpected thing about that, to me, is, if they hate some parts of the process, why are they keeping them? Every team and every business is different and you have to iterate to arrive at whatever will work best for you. That's possibly the one most important point, IMO. Dropping the things that don't work is a key part of that!
Eric Brechner of Microsoft (of all possible places...) gives a great talk on his team's approach, and I've had good experiences using it as a starting point: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CD0y-aU1sXo
But again, every team is different. Even the greatest possible theoretical approach is only a starting point.
And like with Switzerland vs North Korea, I guess the key thing is how much ownership of the process those subjected to it have?
> In that: if it fails, it is only considered evidence that you were not doing it enough.
Seen this multiple times
The problem is agile as in the original manifesto was an ethos, not a process.
Everything since the manifesto, called agile, has tried to wrap an ethos up as a process, playing lip service forgetting the ethos.
High performing teams are already doing agile, following the ethos without attempting to be agile. High performing teams made to do agile become average teams and low performing teams made to do agile can become average teams.
reminds me of the impossible fight for when someone forces themselves into a project and prescribes "industry standard" off-the-shelf solutions, to a problem that requires an engineered custom solution.
And when the final product isn't fit for purpose, what do they say when their decision becomes visible?
the off-the-shelf solution is never at fault. It's your execution. You architect your solution wrong. You didn't configure it right. You just didn't adopt it fully enough. The answer is always to dig deeper into the solution and leverage more of its features.
The problem is that the off-the-shelf solution doesn't even have the right feature set needed for the job in the first place.
Strategic Bombing - the idea wars can be won from the air alone - is the absolute worst of these. It's a religion that might well someday kill us all, or a great many of us. In the quest to dot it "enough" . . .
On a lighter note . .
The world of overly-complex CCS (component content systems) like DITA has made this "Agile flavor of treadmill[1]" into the entire business, greased with liberal squirts of FOMO and "Industry Standards".
It rhymes with capital A Agile in many ways, although in the case of DITA specifically I'd posit that the underlying assumption of the spec is a vast category error: that natural language has formal types.
[1] i.e., "you aren't doing it properly" . . . and with every change in technology the DITA / XML priesthood claimed to hold the keys to unlock it. SEO? Information Typing. Web Content? XML/XAL pipelines. Big Data? Content granularity. LLMs? Information typing and schema will "help" llms and not just be an unholy clog in the guts of vector embedding operations. And yet, the years go by, and all of it has worked and continues to work fine without switching the world to DITA (and a writing universe of strict validation based on speculative assumptions).
> In that: if it fails, it is only considered evidence that you were not doing it enough.
I think you are purposely omitting the fact that those failures have root causes that come from violating key Agile principles.
Things like "we started a project without a big design upfront and we accepted all of the product owner's suggestions, but whe were overworked and ran out of time, and the product owner refused to accommodate requests, and when we finally released the product owner complained the deliverable failed to meet the requirements and expectations".
This scenario is very mundane and showcases a set of failures that are clearly "not doing enough Agile" because it violates basically half of them.
> The solution can never be at fault, it's your execution, or your devotion to the process (in this case) that was faulty.
Agile is a set of principles focused on the process and its execution. What compels you to talk about Agile and pretend that processes and execution are anything other than the core topic?
If your stakeholders change requirements but don't change allocated resources and fail to stay up to date in the daily affairs to monitor and adapt, how is this anything other than glaring failures to adhere to basic Agile principles?
Isn’t Communism the original here? It’s often claimed that all historic attempts to establish Communism don’t work cause it wasn’t done in the right way.
In all seriousness, this pattern is probably hard to avoid in any reasonably complex entity/environment. If any such situation would be solved in a global solution (aka silver bullet), it would be used by everyone. As this seems not possible, any framework like Agile, Communism, … can only be a guidance to be applied locally, and broken internally and by external factors in many ways
Religion. Your life isn't better because of {not devout enough, didn't self-flagellate enough, didn't donate enough to the religious leaders/church/god, committed some other sins, belief is lacking}
Dude, this mode of ex post facto rationalization is waaaay older than communism. It's basically one of the main "retention warnings" of most religions.
I've come to dread any formalization of Agile. Agile development is fine. I've built a 40+ engineering team with it. I can vouch for its effectiveness when applied to small, excellent teams.
For reference, here's all the Agile you need, it's 4 sentences:
Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
Working software over comprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Responding to change over following a plan
The real problem is that capital-A Agile is not agile at all, but exactly the opposite: A fat process that enforces following a plan (regular, rigid meeting structure), creating comprehensive documentation (user stories, specs, mocks, task board) and contract negotiation (estimation meetings, planning poker). It's a bastardization of the original idea, born by process first people who tried to copy the methods of successful teams without understanding them.
Isn't that the biggest issue here, though? I think all of us can agree on the four sentences you wrote, but this only works in a team of professionals with shared goals (and alignment on them!), each individually competent and motivated.
That is the case for a small founder team and maybe a while after that if you're lucky, but IME the more people join a company, the more the alignment and median expertise lessen. At some point, you need to introduce control mechanisms and additional communication tools to rake in the outliers.
> this only works in a team of professionals with shared goals (and alignment on them!), each individually competent and motivated.
Counterpoint: I learned a variant of agile in exactly this type of environment, long before any of this was publicized. Which is another point: agile wasn't something new, certainly not at the time of the manifesto, which was a compromise document. But not even before the manifesto. XP, arguably the first agile methodology, very clearly and deliberately stated that this is nothing new, just a distillation of things that experience has shown to work well.
Anyway, at my next job I introduced agile (small-a-agile) to a team that was anything but skilled. In fact, that team was where the leftovers of that particular development organization had been shunted. When I arrived, the team was as non-functional as the software it was responsible for. Well...
We rocked.
And all the team member improved dramatically in skill during my tenure there. Including myself.
We did not do Agile. No scrum, no standups, no sprints, none of that BS. We were agile. We focused on the technical practices. Test first. Red-green-commit. To trunk, obviously. Because if it's green why on earth would you not?
It took a while for the other parts of the org to adapt to this. The answer to the common question "well, when can you deploy?" was always "now". Well after a quick look that the tests were green. So they stopped asking. Our ops team got bored very quickly. Put jar on box. Start. Forget about it.
What made the experience scientifically interesting is that we had a control group: the main team, much larger, working on the "important" software with all the "good" engineers started with a new project about the same time we did.
They did Agile. Capital-A. Scrum, sprints, standups.
They did not deliver and in fact the project had to be completely reset about two years in. My team-lead (we were co-lead, I did mostly internal/technical, he external/managerial) then got to take over that team as I left for Apple.
TFA, incidentally, is just about as good summary of misunderstandings of agile as I've seen.
I've had good success in both high-skill teams (in one case, almost half the team's engineers ended up at Google at some point or other) and... teams that were still in the process of skilling up. I've found people generally want to do good things and have some room to grow even if they're not yet at your desired level; and when you have demotivated people around, the causes tend to be systemic. Which, thankfully, implies possibly fixable.
It is difficult to explain to a division director that they do not have sufficeint capacity (enough qualified programmers) to compete features within a set time budget. The old joke goes, "It takes one woman nine months to produce a baby. But: what if we just put nine women in a room for one month!?"
I've seen that too, though I have to say that none of those were as waterfally as the actual waterfall process we used to follow. Back then it was quite literally 0 lines of code until spec (100s of pages) is complete.
Which ironically makes Agile even worse at times by forcing developers to implement incomplete spec, parts of which are often rewritten over and over again everytime the PM talks to the client.
Yes, exactly. It works great. But it is not cookie cutter enough for most orgs to adopt which is what led to Scrum, SAFE and what else. And then organisations take those frameworks (often change them to get even more agility out) and adopt them like it is gospel.
I have worked at an org where team members were not allowed to create tickets because that was the scrum master's job and the product owner had to approve all tickets etc. Who can even think that is a good idea??
Not sure what the solution is. There might not be any.
I never really got the "Individuals and interactions over processes and tools" one. What processes and tools is it talking about? Surely it's not saying I should talk to a colleague to track a change rather than use version control? I feel like I'm missing some context of what "tools and processes" it is talking about.
The others I get, but only after having already spent years in software. I guess like many things you have to see the other way before you can appreciate the better way.
If we just put enough effort in and write the right spec/prompt/design then the programmers/llms/plug compatible coding units will produce the correct output first time!
Closing feedback loops. That’s the whole thing. WE Deming would have recognised agile (little a) as a PDCA system and approved.
Agile, as implemented in every big company that I've worked for, was a lie.
It was really telling at a smaller company that was trying to behave like a big company. I asked a coworker (who had great metrics) what the secret was for dealing with the middle-management-heavy and quite dysfunctional environment. He told me how he did it. Paraphrased: "It's easy. During each sprint, I work on the next sprint's work. Once it's complete I'll know how to make sure things match the work that's already been done and that way its always a bullseye and on time - because the work is already done.". Agile at that company was a joke to the people who got things done, and was a weapon used against people who didn't realise it in time. It sure generated a lot of metrics and stats though. I used to joke amongst coworkers that the company produced metrics, not products.
I've also seen agile hollowed out to become a metric delivery system that keeps managers happy; They know what everyone is doing but it keeps upper management happy to see those metrics trend upwards so the wheel keeps spinning. The actual product ends up being a byproduct of the stats.
How did he see into the future to know which work he'd be doing on the next sprint, and how did he also finish the current sprint's work with a bullseye thus allowing the next sprint's to begin and match it?
From my reading, it's really quite brilliant. He just says that he's about to start the tasks that, in reality, he's just finishing up. Then he delays reporting that the task is done. His estimates are then always made with perfect hindsight.
This only works though, if one is working in isolation and no one else checks out the work before the time one commits to the work. That would mean being some lone expert in that part of the product, which is not a good sign for the business, because bus factors of 1.
Ward Cunningham had it right, long ago, when he wrote in "Extreme Programming" [paraphrase]: You don't drive to Florida by carefully lining up your car in New York on I-95 South, locking the steering wheel, and then pressing the accelerator until you arrive.
This was really all that Agile was ever trying to avoid -- the tyranny of imaginedf omniscience. The bad old way (which I did labor under in the '90s) set up a Gant chart of dependent requirement up front, during a "design phase" which completely de-valued learnings and insights gained along the way as a software system was constructed during the "implementation phase". It was the best we had till then, but many software projects were failing due to their inability to adapt to unforeseen design flaws or to the feedback of stakeholders (once the software finally got into their hands).
I don't know why the ceremonies became ossified and sacred. I guess every movement must confront the danger of settling for form over substance. I do know one thing. You can't build an amazon dot com, a Facebook, or a Grand Theft Auto in a 1-million token context session with an LLM. I'm sure you can do it with many such sessions, but it won't be an LLM that ties it all together properly (again - too much context). And I say this as an enthusiastic user of agentic programming.
I think it's worth linking to the original Agile Manifesto[1], because that's pretty much all the consensus you're ever going to get on what's "agile" and "what's not".
Lewis is right that most of these principles were described before the manifesto, but I can vouch for the near-impossibility in many contexts of convincing anyone who wasn't a coder (and a lot of coders too) why these might be sensible defaults.
For every person burned by a subsequent maladaptive formalization of these principles, there was someone horribly scarred before the agile manifesto by being forced to go through a doomed waterfall process.
No, you are not going to get that consensus, because middle management and hire ups don't want to know what agile actually means, but want to continue believing, that the processes they impose are agile, and they have probably never even seen that page. In a truly agile team, the team takes many if not all of their work and responsibilities, so that even the jobs of PMs and low middle management would be on the line. As we know it is difficult to get someone to understand something, when their income depends on not understanding it.
Ask anyone with 30 years in the industry whether "agile", for all its problems, was a force for good or bad, and the answer will be an emphatic Good!
If nothing else, it gave us ammunition to argue against the impossibility of delivering a fixed thing in a fixed amount of time - which was the universal view from senior stakeholders of what competent software delivery looked like.
TFA first claims that agile invented none of the things it encompasses, seems not to challenge those claims, but then just jumps to agile is dead because LLMs can code based on spec.
This is just a confusing and confused article.
Agile just finally embraced that specs are incomplete and can even be wrong because the writer of the spec does not yet really know or understand what they want. So they need working software to show the spec in action and then we can iterate on the results.
We are still doing that and will be doing it in the foreseeable future. Agile is very much alive and here to stay.
Iterative development has existed since forever, since earlier than written history.
It is not something invented by the Agile proponents.
They have proposed a much more specific variant of iterative development, which at least as I have seen it implemented in any company which claimed to implement it, was really bad in comparison with the right ways of organizing development work, which I have seen elsewhere.
Any high quality product must be designed starting from a good written specification. Obviously, almost always the initial specification must pass through one or more update cycles, after experience is gathered through the implementation. This has always been universally used, not just by Agile practitioners.
There have always existed bad managers, who wrongly believed that a development process can always be linear and who did not include in their timelines the necessity for loops, but that was just bad management, so if Agile proponents pointed to such cases, those were just strawmen, not the best existing practices.
I watched a video a few years ago where one of Kent Beck, Martin Fowler, Jeff Sutherland, Ken Schwaber, I don't remember who exactly, explained what they wanted to do with the Agile Manifesto, what screwed up. He explained that they wanted to give guidelines, not a strict rules. They wanted flexibility. But people started selling this as courses, business, rules. Some Agile practitioners become fanatics on the topic. And this created misunderstanding and chaos :D
For 20 years, I have seen it working and not working, and the reasons are a lot.
It can be affected of level of expertise, quality of documentation, pressure from management, engagement of the clients, etc.
Simple example of failing, and how one of my team overcome it. There is no specification. Option 1: team complains that the specification is bad, and this makes the code quality bad. Option 2: the team pro-actively prepared the specifications, gave them to the client for approval. Writing the specification was, a kind of, added flexibility, that was introduced in the sprints.
Another example, why should the sprints be fixed at 2 weeks. Sometimes, people try to finish for two weeks and they produce bad quality code, because they are time pressured. Be flexible and make them 3 weeks, if the sprint includes things like, preparing specifications, or if the sprint includes pauses for bug fixing. :)
So it is not the Agile that makes the project successful, it is the people. Agile just help for tracking where you are , and what you need to do ;)
Now with AI, you can use Agile again, there are agentic frameworks that support it and they give good results, in my opinion. If the people use it wisely, think what they do, and try to do things better, it will work. Of people are lazy, don't know what they are doing, don't have expertise on software development, it will fail :)
I really doubt spec driven development is gonna last. As before, creating working software and iterating on it is faster and makes it easier to understand what you thought you wanted but don't, even if it's vibe coded. So, hello agile, welcome back.
The point is the agent writes the specs and the human reviews and revises or asks for another rewrite that takes 90 seconds or less. So specs are both cheaper and better than anything I've seen before. They still get a lot wrong and it is hard to review them very carefully, but its easier than reviewing code to suss out design intent.
No, not quite. The specifications we use for agents make any ticket written before them pale in comparison. That enables a hybrid workflow that is both spec-driven and "agile", in the sense that you're doing very rapid development cycles.
I personally have never worked in a team where Agile (the concept) has failed. But I've also seen it fail all around me. Especially when it's mandated without buy-in. Or when people just don't "get it".
e.g.
- 45 minute "standups" (!?)
- PI "planning" that consisting of deadlines and glorified multiplayer MS Paint
- Rigid adherence to ceremonies or processes that add zero value
- Retros that focus on complaints and venting with no actionable outcomes
- etc etc
Every time I've introduced Agile to a team or project that was new to it I was always met with skepticism. But 6 months down the line noone on the team/project wanted to go back to the "old" way of working. I don't even really care about any text book definitions. These are the only things we try to stick to:
- Short, daily standups
- Planning based on risk reduction
- Estimates based on complexity (ties in with risk reduction)
- Actionable retro items
- User demos every sprint (makes it easier to pivot - users rarely know what they want)
Good. I've worked in several organizations where we had Agile.
With the years, I've come to think about it as a sing and dance designed to make the project managers, PMs and sales feel like the actually impactful ICs considered them.
There's something really absurd about making programmers sit down and say it's a 5 or 8 effort, then punish them for being "wrong". All it achieves is reduce velocity at best, with the illusion that it's for the greater good.
1. estimate this sprint. let's say it's 100 points.
2. oh no, you shipped 80 points.
3. "we need to better estimates":
a) engineer spends more time trying to guess which direction the wind will blog
b) engineer starts sandbagging estimates
c) engineer changes nothing. looks bad next time the imaginary goal isn't met. "bob needs help estimating".
What does "writing specs" here actually mean? Every agile project I've ever worked on has had a design doc that laid out architecture, the basic shape of contracts, dependencies and so on. In fact, the agile artifacts(tickets, estimates, epics etc.) have always been downstream of a design doc source-of-truth. A project where all the work comes directly from tickets with no overarching, agreed-upon document on what the end goal is supposed to be sounds hellish.
> A project where all the work comes directly from tickets with no overarching, agreed-upon document on what the end goal is supposed to be sounds hellish.
Oh that was it you're right. We have those documents but they are full of lies. Yet everyone can read it and believe it to be true in the way they want it to be.
Ran into the same wall - ceremony eating the actual work. The Flight methodology cuts through it: a landing date, a single captain, no story points, no mandatory standups.
The tagline from the handbook: "Agile started with a manifesto. It ended with Jira."
> One unambiguously positive development that's followed is that software professionals are writing specs again. LLMs - like many of us - do not perform well with ambiguity, and specifying problems is proving to be an effective tool for generating correct code.
Replace "LLM" with "compiler", "specs" with "code" and "correct code" with "correct machine code" and we are back to square one.
I don't get the negativity, there's plenty wrong with agile (notably the hours of meetings) but all in all, it's a method and I don't see anything better right now.
So one of the main points in this massive, 700 word Treatise (which I do hope you will find the time to read) was that nothing Agile practitioners slapped their label onto was actually novel.
Why re-invent agile, when agile itself was just a reinvention by "the kids" (your words, not mine) of things people in the 1970s already knew?
One might as well go straight to the 1970s directly.
As others said, if agile fails, "you were not doing it enoug".
But if agile is criticized... only worse alternatives are given, if at all. Here, spec-driven development is inferior, as in most cases the goal is only vaguely known. Cyclical development is not some hollow mantra, it is how life works. All the rituals around it were just to faciliate more communication. A lot of people in this field just hate that, they want their tickets and to be left alone.
Now that implementation cycles are even shorter, there is even less manual need for coding, agile methodologies will be actually more prevalent.
Wasn't the whole waterfall model originally a caricature to higlight all the issues one will inevitably encounter if they eliminate feedback loops and go with a strictly sequential development paradigm?
If your company doesn't fundamentally want "agility" then it will be an exercise in futility but if you're a person who doesn't want to do useless work then you're an agile proponent fundamentally.
But that is fundamentally what agile is about. It's not about coding faster, it's the recognition that the specs are incomplete or wrong because fundamentally, a lot of customers cannot tell you what the want until they see it. That's why "build something simple and iterate on it" works. Regardless of how good your spec is, once the coding is done the customer is going to realise that that's not what they actually wanted.
These arguments are pointless. Working software is shipped using either method, some combination, or no method at all.
Hell, half the devices in your life probably run some hacked together crap that was built by people who barely knew how to program and eschewed version control for USB sticks.
I really hate discussions of "software" as if the software in an F-35, the software presenting data on a webpage, and the software making a child's toy blink and speak are all the same thing. Only in a very abstract sense are they similar.
A requirement specification is how you prompt software engineers. One-shotting it doesn't work (waterfall). You need to put the SEs in planning mode. They will ask you questions and refine the plan. And you end up with a better plan. But if you make it too complicated the plan will go off the rails. So, you need to make them assign Fibonacci tokens to their planned tasks. Now you have a better plan and you can assign your SEs to tasks and get them working on it. Fibonacci tokens are not time units. This is very important. But you will run out of tokens after two weeks. So you need to buy some extra pizza tokens and make them work until midnight (crunch time!). That's how you get the job done. Every time. Sort of.
I bet some jerk is going to organize a multi agent scrum process at some point and burn some tokens on this nonsense.
If you've never built a complex thing out of wood, I highly recommend it. There's an interesting curve of experience. First you try to build basic things, and it seems kinda easy, everything just works. Then you start trying more advanced things, and it seems like everything gets screwed up constantly. Finally you master the advanced things, and you screw up less and it gets easier.
The same is true of software. At first you try to make software, and you do, and it's kinda easy. Then you try to make more advanced software, and it seems much harder than it should be, as what you think will work doesn't. You spend a lot of time changing your design to make things work, which ends up not being exactly as you thought it should at first. Finally, after you master software development, things get easier and work like you expect.
In both cases, when you are ignorant, you do the wrong thing, and it works despite your ignorance, because you're doing an easy thing in the most straightforward way. But then you get cocky and try things that aren't as easy, and suddenly the straightforward way doesn't work anymore, because complex things never work the way you expect. Finally, after you've screwed up doing the thing enough, you remember what not to do, and now you can do it without the mistakes. But you're just not-screwing-up the things you already screwed up once before. You'll still screw up new things, because you haven't learned them yet. And you'll screw up again when you forget a past screw-up.
What separates the woodworker from the software engineer is, the woodworker doesn't make a lot of different things, and doesn't use a lot of different ways to do it. The software engineer is constantly doing new things, in different ways. So the software engineer is perpetually rising to their level of ignorance, while the woodworker stays mostly within their level of competence.
This is why there is no system in the universe that will be better than any other at software development. Agile, Waterfall, or anything else, doesn't matter. As long as you keep doing new things, you'll never not be screwing up. But stick to one thing and master it, and it doesn't matter how you do it.
This post sets up a straw man from the outset, and only gets worse from there.
I understand how got here, where many experienced software programmers, managers, and bloggers only know capital-A Agile in the watered down version sold via certifications and crummy medium posts.
I can’t even with the pitch into spec driven development as some high watermark of software methodology.
Lucky me, I've never had to say Hi Agile in a first place. It is a tumor. Been in programming since 80s. Mostly on my own except 6 years long stint at the company. Quit in 2000 from position of CTO
I wonder if there is no AI product yet which runs scrum ceremonies, assigns user stories in planning and computes story point velocity after the sprint ends.
I'm of the belief that most project management voodoo is just that - voodoo. There is no rigor, there's no formal basis for ideas, and there's no testing of hypotheses and rejection when evidence counters it.
Engineering (even in computing) has a formal basis and practice. Project management does not. Systems thinking and industrial organizational psychology does, but rarely do you see it applied like bullshit such as agile (and in environments that do - it works spectacularly).
Out with the voodoo, and in with the scientific method, I say.
Someone once described agile as this: Its just pantomime and posit notes... implying that the process (from the outside) was more performative than anything else.
From "scrum masters" to "planing poker" it's all very silly.
There's an interesting phenomenon that Agile (capital A) has exposed me to, and once I saw it due to Agile I've seen parallels elsewhere.
In that: if it fails, it is only considered evidence that you were not doing it enough.
The solution can never be at fault, it's your execution, or your devotion to the process (in this case) that was faulty.
It's also true for Cloud providers; that they're not suited for certain tasks is no longer considered an engineering trade-off, it's that you architected your solution wrong, and the answer is to buy even more into how the platform works.
If your microservices become slow or difficult to debug, it's never that fatter services could have been preferable, it's that we didn't go hard-enough into microservices.
If Austerity is not working as an economic model; the answer isn't to invest in growth, it's to cut even more corners.
I feel like I see it all the time.
My favorite Agile-ism is when Agile is defined as “the process that works for the team”.
If a team adopts agile (in any variation) and doesn’t like it, the Agile defenders will appear and argue that the team wasn’t actually doing agile. Agile is defined as the process that works, so if it didn’t work it couldn’t have been agile. If only you read The Agile Manifesto you would understand!
> My favorite Agile-ism is when Agile is defined as “the process that works for the team”.
What compels you to believe it isn't?
I mean, read the Agile Manifesto. All it does is basically define a set of values and principles. Things like "customer comes first" or "we welcome changes in requirements" or "software must be delivered frequently".
What leads you to believe Agile implies a fixed set of precise, rigid rules?
The problem is a disconnect between management and those who build.
My thoughts when PE forced Agile on my employer were dismissed as "you're the technical expert, we're the process experts".
As someone without decision power, you read words of empowerment but your reality is a different one, and you're left resolving that dissonance on your own (quietly, otherwise you get pushed aside).
It isnt but the fact it ultra vague and hand wavey means anybody can claim anything they do is agile including things that the exact opposite.
I actually think OP's criticisms apply mostly to Scrum. Scrum is well defined but its adherents' wont hear a critical word said about it. "You just werent doing it right" even when you were doing it precisely as described.
The fact that you spell agile with a capital "A" says all I need to know.
I suspect there might not be love for this angle here, but there's something else that follows this format: God. Spirituality. Religion.
I'm not religious is any traditional sense, but I'd argue that it's not always the hallmark of a bad dynamic when a system always asks of you to do inner work when failures happen in contact with the real world. Sometimes that's a healthier mode than the alternative -- externalizing the blame, and blaming the system (or the god).
I suspect there a very abstract game theoretic conversation that could be had about this :)
when it comes to some diets, some only work if you follow them wholeheartedly, like meat only diet, one speck of peppar might be enough to cause an inflammation. But generally you can't take a process that worked well for another person or company and apply it on you or your company. Like for example a training program, you can't just take a training program from a professional athlete and reuse it on your kid and expect him/her to become as good as the pro. Programs and processes are very individual tailored.
A process that fails when you slightly diverge is process that fails. Because all human orgs diverge from stated process here or there. Including army which puts huge amounts of resources into making people comply with everything.
> I suspect there might not be love for this angle here, but there's something else that follows this format: God. Spirituality. Religion.
Yes, and that's because God, spirituality and religion make fuzzy truth claims and can be used to argue for and justify anything. God can be used as the excuse to start a genocide and the inspiration to stop it, spirituality can be the way for wounded people to work with their trauma and the vehicle for people without scruples to sell horoscopes or some shit, religion (the same religion) was used to justify and uphold slavery and to fight for its end.
They are containers for our politics, our lifestyle, for who we are and for who we hope to be.
The Agile manifesto is a series of statements in the form "we like X more than Y." It doesn't say anything. To make it mean anything you have to project onto it a framework of interpretation that exists independently of the "sacred text" itself.
So yeah, they are similar, and that's because Agile, sociologically, works like a religion.
It's usually because your company doesn't fundamentally want it. You cannot have roadmaps with lists of features that you advertise to customers AND have the flexibility to decide to ignore things that turn out to be useless or disporportionately time consuming.
If someone handed you a plan for making a jet engine and you messed around with the instructions ... why would you expect it to work? If you have a bug because there are not enough tests ... you write more tests don't you? Why would a method be forgiving when compilers and reality itself aren't?
But that isn't evidence that the method works. If you're a native tribe, that has an ancient traditional rain dance, it is invoked whenever there is a drought. Sometimes it rains shortly after the dance is performed. But if it doesn't rain, it's not proof that you danced poorly, it's evidence that you didn't understand the situation fully or properly. The instructions or "wisdom" you relied on, didn't actually capture something useful.
My evidence is that I was on a team that was not overly controlled by management and had clever people in it without any instant attitudes of rejection so they adapted to it. We produced updates bi-weekly and we had a huge backlog of stupid features which we were never going to get round to - we were able to get the important things done and it was one of the best feelings I've ever had about work.
Since then I've been on teams with any number of pathologies. From developers it is sometimes the desired to be special - those ones who want to work on their bit of the code and not let anyone else touch it. From managers it's things like forcing the way stories are split so that they're always too large and can never fit into a sprint - because they think that everything must be a "user visible change". Management types also sit in retrospectives and use them to crap on everyone. Product managers demand features which they don't know will really interest customers and are inflexible about them - they want "everything" just in case and that delays the work and deletes any chance of a feedback loop.
The good agile feeling came from being able to have control and be successful. When it's messed up, you're out of control and cannot avert disasters. Whatever method you want to call it, I think we need to feel we're in control enough to succeed.
What is the chance that you've perfectly captured every aspect of the situation that led to success? Versus, what is the chance that you were lucky enough to be in situations where a multitude of factors, both appreciated and unappreciated, combined to lead to success?
There are a million possible reasons for failure, but here is a very easy one: It doesn't matter how good you feel about the development process, if the company has the wrong objective. You will still end up being frustrated, and failing. Of course this will have all sorts of pathological and uncomfortable ramifications.
So while it is easy to say, "just act this way and you'll have success". You're not actually appreciating all the hidden elements that allow any hope of acting that way. You've been lucky enough to be in situations where it happened to work (ie. the rain dance made rain), but that does not mean it's actually representative, or that the prescription actually captures the critical information needed to ensure success for other people. Instead, you've described a rain dance.
You're right - there isn't one way to do things or one way that always works. There are issues that are outside a team's control, for example, that make it an impossible struggle. If you're rigidly forced to do something and cannot adapt then you're ... not really agile. But you have to understand why you're doing what you're doing and keep adjusting to see what works for you.
#1 IMO is that if the company you're in is non-agile in its general attitude, which is influenced by its own customers, then everything is geared against you.
That isn't to say that something like Kanban might not be usable or better than no plan at all but certainly scrum is not some universal solution.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman seems pertinent here.
This is a great point! Reminds me of Agentic software development. When it doesn't work out it's only evidence that you could have used more agents.
You can never use enough tokens.
Which also conveniently makes you spend more money on tokens.
With agile, at least no one was charging you for it. Like sure, there’s a cost to the process. But there wasn’t direct agile.com profiting from you.
Meanwhile agentic workflows every solution to the problem is giving more money to the ai companies.
Model is bad? Made more expensive model. Still bad? Here’s an infrastructure that reads huge text files again and again making you consume tokens. Still bad? Here’s a way to easily spin up multiple agents at once so you can delegate work. Still bad? Here’s a new service that will automatically review code. Still bad? Maybe a biggger more expensive model will help.
>> With agile, at least no one was charging you for it.
Depends. There are companies [1] making loads of money out of it. Charging for certification and imposing the idea that either you are certified, or you are going to fail. They are even eating the lunch of PMI, as PMI (PMBoK) is turning into an Agile manual. Where I work is being expended literally millions per year in Agile.
[1] https://scaledagile.com/what-is-safe/
> This is a great point! Reminds me of Agentic software development. When it doesn't work out it's only evidence that you could have used more agents.
A concept older than agentic software development is bad workmen blaming his tools.
I mean, if you can't possibly hammer a nail then is it reasonable to blame the hammer?
If it's an internet-required smarthammer without a handle that instead hits out on voice prompt, sometimes without enough or with too much force, sometimes knocks the nail out of the way and punches a hole, and sometimes hits you in the face, then yeah
Clearly they didn't use enough hammer. Screws always require the most hammer. Common knowledge to any certified practitioner of Hammer™[1].
- [1] Get 20% off your Hammer Master™ certificate with referral code THUMBPAIN
Yes, but on the other hand, there's https://www.reddit.com/r/ididnthaveeggs/, which collects cases of home cooks making inadvisable recipe substitutions and then complaining to the recipe creators that the resulting dish tasted bad. Sometimes there are essential ingredients and skipping them or replacing them with something else makes success impossible.
An appealing analogy but recipes have defined testable outcomes. You know what a Victoria sponge is supposed to look like (there's probably even a picture of one in the book). You can perfectly evaluate when a substitute has ruined it.
Agile doesn't have that, there is no functional equivelant of "the cake should be moist and rise evenly". What does "Agile" adoption look like? Faster delivery? Happier Developers? More revenue? Fewer bugs? This is never defined up front and they shift depending on the person being asked. This means you can never actually determine if someone "left out an essential ingredient".
The irony is that Agiles own favoured development practice (TDD) cannot be applied to Agile itself. There is no acceptance test for the process, you can't iterate on something that isn't measured and has no defined outcome.
/r/ididnthaveeggs works because everyone agrees on what the dish should have been.
I mean, Switzerland and North Korea both call themselves democracies but the specifics matter. The specifics matter!
These discussions are always fascinating in a sort of baffling way to me because I've only had great experiences with what I call agile. Like, you bring it into the team and within months everyone is gushing about how much better life is now. Yet threads like this one are full of people reporting awful experiences.
Apparently whatever it is they're doing involves a lot of meetings and little actual flexibility? The deeply unexpected thing about that, to me, is, if they hate some parts of the process, why are they keeping them? Every team and every business is different and you have to iterate to arrive at whatever will work best for you. That's possibly the one most important point, IMO. Dropping the things that don't work is a key part of that!
Eric Brechner of Microsoft (of all possible places...) gives a great talk on his team's approach, and I've had good experiences using it as a starting point: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CD0y-aU1sXo
But again, every team is different. Even the greatest possible theoretical approach is only a starting point.
And like with Switzerland vs North Korea, I guess the key thing is how much ownership of the process those subjected to it have?
Ideologues are everywhere.
If it isn’t presented as a theory that might be proven wrong, or an idea that might not work, that’s when my alarm starts going off.
Another signal: trying stuff we already tried that didn’t work, usually with an unconvincing reason why it’s different this time.
>I feel like I see it all the time.
Sometimes its justified. Like "This is only satisfied when x, y and z are correct"
But then you get
"We will do x and y as a compromise but not z"
And then you have to explain that, the compromise is actually worse.
> In that: if it fails, it is only considered evidence that you were not doing it enough.
Seen this multiple times
The problem is agile as in the original manifesto was an ethos, not a process.
Everything since the manifesto, called agile, has tried to wrap an ethos up as a process, playing lip service forgetting the ethos.
High performing teams are already doing agile, following the ethos without attempting to be agile. High performing teams made to do agile become average teams and low performing teams made to do agile can become average teams.
reminds me of the impossible fight for when someone forces themselves into a project and prescribes "industry standard" off-the-shelf solutions, to a problem that requires an engineered custom solution.
And when the final product isn't fit for purpose, what do they say when their decision becomes visible?
the off-the-shelf solution is never at fault. It's your execution. You architect your solution wrong. You didn't configure it right. You just didn't adopt it fully enough. The answer is always to dig deeper into the solution and leverage more of its features.
The problem is that the off-the-shelf solution doesn't even have the right feature set needed for the job in the first place.
Strategic Bombing - the idea wars can be won from the air alone - is the absolute worst of these. It's a religion that might well someday kill us all, or a great many of us. In the quest to dot it "enough" . . .
On a lighter note . .
The world of overly-complex CCS (component content systems) like DITA has made this "Agile flavor of treadmill[1]" into the entire business, greased with liberal squirts of FOMO and "Industry Standards".
It rhymes with capital A Agile in many ways, although in the case of DITA specifically I'd posit that the underlying assumption of the spec is a vast category error: that natural language has formal types.
[1] i.e., "you aren't doing it properly" . . . and with every change in technology the DITA / XML priesthood claimed to hold the keys to unlock it. SEO? Information Typing. Web Content? XML/XAL pipelines. Big Data? Content granularity. LLMs? Information typing and schema will "help" llms and not just be an unholy clog in the guts of vector embedding operations. And yet, the years go by, and all of it has worked and continues to work fine without switching the world to DITA (and a writing universe of strict validation based on speculative assumptions).
I've seen similar effect with Montesori, Waldorf, Kumon methods. If something is wrong, is because it was misunderstood, or not properly done.
This is the horseshoe theory of Agile. If you do Agile hard enough you end up at SAFe which is basically waterfall.
Waterfall disguised with other names and extrem expensive certification.
If AI fails, you wrote the prompt wrong.
If brute force is not working, you are not using enough.
> In that: if it fails, it is only considered evidence that you were not doing it enough.
I think you are purposely omitting the fact that those failures have root causes that come from violating key Agile principles.
Things like "we started a project without a big design upfront and we accepted all of the product owner's suggestions, but whe were overworked and ran out of time, and the product owner refused to accommodate requests, and when we finally released the product owner complained the deliverable failed to meet the requirements and expectations".
This scenario is very mundane and showcases a set of failures that are clearly "not doing enough Agile" because it violates basically half of them.
> The solution can never be at fault, it's your execution, or your devotion to the process (in this case) that was faulty.
Agile is a set of principles focused on the process and its execution. What compels you to talk about Agile and pretend that processes and execution are anything other than the core topic?
If your stakeholders change requirements but don't change allocated resources and fail to stay up to date in the daily affairs to monitor and adapt, how is this anything other than glaring failures to adhere to basic Agile principles?
> In that: if it fails, it is only considered evidence that you were not doing it enough.
Good way to ensure devotion to a process rather than devotion to a desirable outcome. Seems distinctly cult-like.
It's basicy gas lighting at this point
> In that: if it fails, it is only considered evidence that you were not doing it enough.
This is a cult tactic, for what it's worth
Isn’t Communism the original here? It’s often claimed that all historic attempts to establish Communism don’t work cause it wasn’t done in the right way.
In all seriousness, this pattern is probably hard to avoid in any reasonably complex entity/environment. If any such situation would be solved in a global solution (aka silver bullet), it would be used by everyone. As this seems not possible, any framework like Agile, Communism, … can only be a guidance to be applied locally, and broken internally and by external factors in many ways
Religion. Your life isn't better because of {not devout enough, didn't self-flagellate enough, didn't donate enough to the religious leaders/church/god, committed some other sins, belief is lacking}
Dude, this mode of ex post facto rationalization is waaaay older than communism. It's basically one of the main "retention warnings" of most religions.
I've come to dread any formalization of Agile. Agile development is fine. I've built a 40+ engineering team with it. I can vouch for its effectiveness when applied to small, excellent teams.
For reference, here's all the Agile you need, it's 4 sentences:
Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
Working software over comprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Responding to change over following a plan
The real problem is that capital-A Agile is not agile at all, but exactly the opposite: A fat process that enforces following a plan (regular, rigid meeting structure), creating comprehensive documentation (user stories, specs, mocks, task board) and contract negotiation (estimation meetings, planning poker). It's a bastardization of the original idea, born by process first people who tried to copy the methods of successful teams without understanding them.
> […] when applied to small, excellent teams.
Isn't that the biggest issue here, though? I think all of us can agree on the four sentences you wrote, but this only works in a team of professionals with shared goals (and alignment on them!), each individually competent and motivated.
That is the case for a small founder team and maybe a while after that if you're lucky, but IME the more people join a company, the more the alignment and median expertise lessen. At some point, you need to introduce control mechanisms and additional communication tools to rake in the outliers.
I don't really have a better answer, though…
> this only works in a team of professionals with shared goals (and alignment on them!), each individually competent and motivated.
Counterpoint: I learned a variant of agile in exactly this type of environment, long before any of this was publicized. Which is another point: agile wasn't something new, certainly not at the time of the manifesto, which was a compromise document. But not even before the manifesto. XP, arguably the first agile methodology, very clearly and deliberately stated that this is nothing new, just a distillation of things that experience has shown to work well.
Anyway, at my next job I introduced agile (small-a-agile) to a team that was anything but skilled. In fact, that team was where the leftovers of that particular development organization had been shunted. When I arrived, the team was as non-functional as the software it was responsible for. Well...
We rocked.
And all the team member improved dramatically in skill during my tenure there. Including myself.
We did not do Agile. No scrum, no standups, no sprints, none of that BS. We were agile. We focused on the technical practices. Test first. Red-green-commit. To trunk, obviously. Because if it's green why on earth would you not?
It took a while for the other parts of the org to adapt to this. The answer to the common question "well, when can you deploy?" was always "now". Well after a quick look that the tests were green. So they stopped asking. Our ops team got bored very quickly. Put jar on box. Start. Forget about it.
What made the experience scientifically interesting is that we had a control group: the main team, much larger, working on the "important" software with all the "good" engineers started with a new project about the same time we did.
They did Agile. Capital-A. Scrum, sprints, standups.
They did not deliver and in fact the project had to be completely reset about two years in. My team-lead (we were co-lead, I did mostly internal/technical, he external/managerial) then got to take over that team as I left for Apple.
TFA, incidentally, is just about as good summary of misunderstandings of agile as I've seen.
I've had good success in both high-skill teams (in one case, almost half the team's engineers ended up at Google at some point or other) and... teams that were still in the process of skilling up. I've found people generally want to do good things and have some room to grow even if they're not yet at your desired level; and when you have demotivated people around, the causes tend to be systemic. Which, thankfully, implies possibly fixable.
I can't count how many times I've seen "agile" projects that were just actually waterfall due to demands from stakeholders.
Absolutely! "You're going to do agile .... and this list of features will be ready on September 20th."
"Oh, feature no 32 is going to take months and we realised that users can just...."
"No"
> "You're going to do agile .... and this list of features will be ready on September 20th."
Well often the real world forces it upon you. As in customer will switch invoicing system on September 20th, integrations have to be ready by then.
We have a lot of this, and hard cut-off is very frequent. If we ain't got all those deliverables implemented by then we will lose customers.
It is difficult to explain to a division director that they do not have sufficeint capacity (enough qualified programmers) to compete features within a set time budget. The old joke goes, "It takes one woman nine months to produce a baby. But: what if we just put nine women in a room for one month!?"
I've seen that too, though I have to say that none of those were as waterfally as the actual waterfall process we used to follow. Back then it was quite literally 0 lines of code until spec (100s of pages) is complete.
Which ironically makes Agile even worse at times by forcing developers to implement incomplete spec, parts of which are often rewritten over and over again everytime the PM talks to the client.
Ah yes, the old Agile-as-drunken-waterfall pattern
Yes, exactly. It works great. But it is not cookie cutter enough for most orgs to adopt which is what led to Scrum, SAFE and what else. And then organisations take those frameworks (often change them to get even more agility out) and adopt them like it is gospel.
I have worked at an org where team members were not allowed to create tickets because that was the scrum master's job and the product owner had to approve all tickets etc. Who can even think that is a good idea??
Not sure what the solution is. There might not be any.
I never really got the "Individuals and interactions over processes and tools" one. What processes and tools is it talking about? Surely it's not saying I should talk to a colleague to track a change rather than use version control? I feel like I'm missing some context of what "tools and processes" it is talking about.
The others I get, but only after having already spent years in software. I guess like many things you have to see the other way before you can appreciate the better way.
If we just put enough effort in and write the right spec/prompt/design then the programmers/llms/plug compatible coding units will produce the correct output first time!
Closing feedback loops. That’s the whole thing. WE Deming would have recognised agile (little a) as a PDCA system and approved.
Agile, as implemented in every big company that I've worked for, was a lie.
It was really telling at a smaller company that was trying to behave like a big company. I asked a coworker (who had great metrics) what the secret was for dealing with the middle-management-heavy and quite dysfunctional environment. He told me how he did it. Paraphrased: "It's easy. During each sprint, I work on the next sprint's work. Once it's complete I'll know how to make sure things match the work that's already been done and that way its always a bullseye and on time - because the work is already done.". Agile at that company was a joke to the people who got things done, and was a weapon used against people who didn't realise it in time. It sure generated a lot of metrics and stats though. I used to joke amongst coworkers that the company produced metrics, not products.
I've also seen agile hollowed out to become a metric delivery system that keeps managers happy; They know what everyone is doing but it keeps upper management happy to see those metrics trend upwards so the wheel keeps spinning. The actual product ends up being a byproduct of the stats.
How did he see into the future to know which work he'd be doing on the next sprint, and how did he also finish the current sprint's work with a bullseye thus allowing the next sprint's to begin and match it?
From my reading, it's really quite brilliant. He just says that he's about to start the tasks that, in reality, he's just finishing up. Then he delays reporting that the task is done. His estimates are then always made with perfect hindsight.
This only works though, if one is working in isolation and no one else checks out the work before the time one commits to the work. That would mean being some lone expert in that part of the product, which is not a good sign for the business, because bus factors of 1.
Not the op, but you only commit to what you already did in this sprint.
So this sprint shows what you delivered 2 sprints ago, next sprint will be the work you just finished.
Ward Cunningham had it right, long ago, when he wrote in "Extreme Programming" [paraphrase]: You don't drive to Florida by carefully lining up your car in New York on I-95 South, locking the steering wheel, and then pressing the accelerator until you arrive.
This was really all that Agile was ever trying to avoid -- the tyranny of imaginedf omniscience. The bad old way (which I did labor under in the '90s) set up a Gant chart of dependent requirement up front, during a "design phase" which completely de-valued learnings and insights gained along the way as a software system was constructed during the "implementation phase". It was the best we had till then, but many software projects were failing due to their inability to adapt to unforeseen design flaws or to the feedback of stakeholders (once the software finally got into their hands).
I don't know why the ceremonies became ossified and sacred. I guess every movement must confront the danger of settling for form over substance. I do know one thing. You can't build an amazon dot com, a Facebook, or a Grand Theft Auto in a 1-million token context session with an LLM. I'm sure you can do it with many such sessions, but it won't be an LLM that ties it all together properly (again - too much context). And I say this as an enthusiastic user of agentic programming.
I think it's worth linking to the original Agile Manifesto[1], because that's pretty much all the consensus you're ever going to get on what's "agile" and "what's not".
Lewis is right that most of these principles were described before the manifesto, but I can vouch for the near-impossibility in many contexts of convincing anyone who wasn't a coder (and a lot of coders too) why these might be sensible defaults.
For every person burned by a subsequent maladaptive formalization of these principles, there was someone horribly scarred before the agile manifesto by being forced to go through a doomed waterfall process.
No, you are not going to get that consensus, because middle management and hire ups don't want to know what agile actually means, but want to continue believing, that the processes they impose are agile, and they have probably never even seen that page. In a truly agile team, the team takes many if not all of their work and responsibilities, so that even the jobs of PMs and low middle management would be on the line. As we know it is difficult to get someone to understand something, when their income depends on not understanding it.
Yes!
Ask anyone with 30 years in the industry whether "agile", for all its problems, was a force for good or bad, and the answer will be an emphatic Good!
If nothing else, it gave us ammunition to argue against the impossibility of delivering a fixed thing in a fixed amount of time - which was the universal view from senior stakeholders of what competent software delivery looked like.
TFA first claims that agile invented none of the things it encompasses, seems not to challenge those claims, but then just jumps to agile is dead because LLMs can code based on spec.
This is just a confusing and confused article.
Agile just finally embraced that specs are incomplete and can even be wrong because the writer of the spec does not yet really know or understand what they want. So they need working software to show the spec in action and then we can iterate on the results.
We are still doing that and will be doing it in the foreseeable future. Agile is very much alive and here to stay.
Iterative development has existed since forever, since earlier than written history.
It is not something invented by the Agile proponents.
They have proposed a much more specific variant of iterative development, which at least as I have seen it implemented in any company which claimed to implement it, was really bad in comparison with the right ways of organizing development work, which I have seen elsewhere.
Any high quality product must be designed starting from a good written specification. Obviously, almost always the initial specification must pass through one or more update cycles, after experience is gathered through the implementation. This has always been universally used, not just by Agile practitioners.
There have always existed bad managers, who wrongly believed that a development process can always be linear and who did not include in their timelines the necessity for loops, but that was just bad management, so if Agile proponents pointed to such cases, those were just strawmen, not the best existing practices.
I watched a video a few years ago where one of Kent Beck, Martin Fowler, Jeff Sutherland, Ken Schwaber, I don't remember who exactly, explained what they wanted to do with the Agile Manifesto, what screwed up. He explained that they wanted to give guidelines, not a strict rules. They wanted flexibility. But people started selling this as courses, business, rules. Some Agile practitioners become fanatics on the topic. And this created misunderstanding and chaos :D
For 20 years, I have seen it working and not working, and the reasons are a lot. It can be affected of level of expertise, quality of documentation, pressure from management, engagement of the clients, etc.
Simple example of failing, and how one of my team overcome it. There is no specification. Option 1: team complains that the specification is bad, and this makes the code quality bad. Option 2: the team pro-actively prepared the specifications, gave them to the client for approval. Writing the specification was, a kind of, added flexibility, that was introduced in the sprints.
Another example, why should the sprints be fixed at 2 weeks. Sometimes, people try to finish for two weeks and they produce bad quality code, because they are time pressured. Be flexible and make them 3 weeks, if the sprint includes things like, preparing specifications, or if the sprint includes pauses for bug fixing. :)
So it is not the Agile that makes the project successful, it is the people. Agile just help for tracking where you are , and what you need to do ;)
Now with AI, you can use Agile again, there are agentic frameworks that support it and they give good results, in my opinion. If the people use it wisely, think what they do, and try to do things better, it will work. Of people are lazy, don't know what they are doing, don't have expertise on software development, it will fail :)
I really doubt spec driven development is gonna last. As before, creating working software and iterating on it is faster and makes it easier to understand what you thought you wanted but don't, even if it's vibe coded. So, hello agile, welcome back.
The point is the agent writes the specs and the human reviews and revises or asks for another rewrite that takes 90 seconds or less. So specs are both cheaper and better than anything I've seen before. They still get a lot wrong and it is hard to review them very carefully, but its easier than reviewing code to suss out design intent.
The point is that sometimes you don't know the spec is wrong until you've built the software and it's being used.
Still though, that cycle can be iterated many times in a single day. Write a spec, let the agent build it, use the software, evaluate results, repeat.
Until the agents start touching things that already worked well before and break them.
Yes, that's agile software development.
No, not quite. The specifications we use for agents make any ticket written before them pale in comparison. That enables a hybrid workflow that is both spec-driven and "agile", in the sense that you're doing very rapid development cycles.
I think there is some good middle ground between spec driven development and iterations, like Compound Engineering. https://github.com/EveryInc/compound-engineering-plugin
I personally have never worked in a team where Agile (the concept) has failed. But I've also seen it fail all around me. Especially when it's mandated without buy-in. Or when people just don't "get it".
e.g.
- 45 minute "standups" (!?)
- PI "planning" that consisting of deadlines and glorified multiplayer MS Paint
- Rigid adherence to ceremonies or processes that add zero value
- Retros that focus on complaints and venting with no actionable outcomes
- etc etc
Every time I've introduced Agile to a team or project that was new to it I was always met with skepticism. But 6 months down the line noone on the team/project wanted to go back to the "old" way of working. I don't even really care about any text book definitions. These are the only things we try to stick to:
- Short, daily standups
- Planning based on risk reduction
- Estimates based on complexity (ties in with risk reduction)
- Actionable retro items
- User demos every sprint (makes it easier to pivot - users rarely know what they want)
Good. I've worked in several organizations where we had Agile.
With the years, I've come to think about it as a sing and dance designed to make the project managers, PMs and sales feel like the actually impactful ICs considered them.
There's something really absurd about making programmers sit down and say it's a 5 or 8 effort, then punish them for being "wrong". All it achieves is reduce velocity at best, with the illusion that it's for the greater good.
Worked in and managed a few "Agile" teams. Never heard of a dev get punished for a bad estimate. Can you describe exactly what you mean?
1. estimate this sprint. let's say it's 100 points. 2. oh no, you shipped 80 points. 3. "we need to better estimates":
a) engineer spends more time trying to guess which direction the wind will blog b) engineer starts sandbagging estimates c) engineer changes nothing. looks bad next time the imaginary goal isn't met. "bob needs help estimating".
What does "writing specs" here actually mean? Every agile project I've ever worked on has had a design doc that laid out architecture, the basic shape of contracts, dependencies and so on. In fact, the agile artifacts(tickets, estimates, epics etc.) have always been downstream of a design doc source-of-truth. A project where all the work comes directly from tickets with no overarching, agreed-upon document on what the end goal is supposed to be sounds hellish.
> A project where all the work comes directly from tickets with no overarching, agreed-upon document on what the end goal is supposed to be sounds hellish.
Oh that was it you're right. We have those documents but they are full of lies. Yet everyone can read it and believe it to be true in the way they want it to be.
Traditional design doc review processes aren't perfect but I'll take them over Radical Ticket Anarchy any day of the week.
Author here.
Well I think this just proves we can slap "agile" onto anything. The people before agile actually wrote things with more substance than the manifesto.
The agile projects you worked on sound wonderful, and I would align "writing specs" with what you describe, at least in terms of the design doc.
Ran into the same wall - ceremony eating the actual work. The Flight methodology cuts through it: a landing date, a single captain, no story points, no mandatory standups.
The tagline from the handbook: "Agile started with a manifesto. It ended with Jira."
Handbook: https://agile.flights/docs/introduction/why-flights/
> One unambiguously positive development that's followed is that software professionals are writing specs again. LLMs - like many of us - do not perform well with ambiguity, and specifying problems is proving to be an effective tool for generating correct code.
Replace "LLM" with "compiler", "specs" with "code" and "correct code" with "correct machine code" and we are back to square one.
I don't get the negativity, there's plenty wrong with agile (notably the hours of meetings) but all in all, it's a method and I don't see anything better right now.
Oh no, the kids are going to invent agile again aren't they?
Stay hopeful, maybe Nu-Agile will become annoying in new and interesting ways!
Aigile
Author here.
So one of the main points in this massive, 700 word Treatise (which I do hope you will find the time to read) was that nothing Agile practitioners slapped their label onto was actually novel.
Why re-invent agile, when agile itself was just a reinvention by "the kids" (your words, not mine) of things people in the 1970s already knew?
One might as well go straight to the 1970s directly.
As others said, if agile fails, "you were not doing it enoug".
But if agile is criticized... only worse alternatives are given, if at all. Here, spec-driven development is inferior, as in most cases the goal is only vaguely known. Cyclical development is not some hollow mantra, it is how life works. All the rituals around it were just to faciliate more communication. A lot of people in this field just hate that, they want their tickets and to be left alone.
Now that implementation cycles are even shorter, there is even less manual need for coding, agile methodologies will be actually more prevalent.
The way the author defined water fall makes it sound pretty good to me.
Put your hand up if you are ever programming with poor specs?
Put your hand up if you have a better idea of what really was wanted after the first cut?
And what I really dislike is those that try to design a Swiss Army knife from day one when they haven’t a clue. Jump immediately into over complexity.
Wasn't the whole waterfall model originally a caricature to higlight all the issues one will inevitably encounter if they eliminate feedback loops and go with a strictly sequential development paradigm?
Author here.
Yes, that would be the first paper I linked to in the article, "Managing the Development of Large Software Systems" (Royce, 1970).
The first diagram is the classic waterfall diagram, used there for illustrative purposes as an example of what not to do.
Highly recommend it to people - it's short but a real breathe of fresh air. Mostly still applicable today.
If your company doesn't fundamentally want "agility" then it will be an exercise in futility but if you're a person who doesn't want to do useless work then you're an agile proponent fundamentally.
I've written something similar https://blog.dochia.dev/blog/waterfall-returning/ As code is less expensive, specs are the new bottleneck.
And good riddance too.
Agile was always aiming to solve the wrong problem (that code is the bottleneck) but it turned out to be a massive lie exposed by LLMs.
It’s always the poor specs, terrible analysis and release constraints that kill projects.
"Agile was always aiming to solve the wrong problem (that code is the bottleneck)"
No, it aimed to solve the "out specs are bad and we need to iterate faster" problem.
"a massive lie exposed by LLMs"
No. LLMs add no insight about the problem and they expose nothing. They just help to engage this well-known problem with another tool.
> always the poor specs
But that is fundamentally what agile is about. It's not about coding faster, it's the recognition that the specs are incomplete or wrong because fundamentally, a lot of customers cannot tell you what the want until they see it. That's why "build something simple and iterate on it" works. Regardless of how good your spec is, once the coding is done the customer is going to realise that that's not what they actually wanted.
Agile never claimed that.
Agile is about working code instead of hundreds of pages of spec nobody reads.
>It’s always the poor specs, terrible analysis and release constraints that kill projects.
So most of the problems are related to business people and not the development teams? Who would have guessed?
These arguments are pointless. Working software is shipped using either method, some combination, or no method at all.
Hell, half the devices in your life probably run some hacked together crap that was built by people who barely knew how to program and eschewed version control for USB sticks.
I really hate discussions of "software" as if the software in an F-35, the software presenting data on a webpage, and the software making a child's toy blink and speak are all the same thing. Only in a very abstract sense are they similar.
A requirement specification is how you prompt software engineers. One-shotting it doesn't work (waterfall). You need to put the SEs in planning mode. They will ask you questions and refine the plan. And you end up with a better plan. But if you make it too complicated the plan will go off the rails. So, you need to make them assign Fibonacci tokens to their planned tasks. Now you have a better plan and you can assign your SEs to tasks and get them working on it. Fibonacci tokens are not time units. This is very important. But you will run out of tokens after two weeks. So you need to buy some extra pizza tokens and make them work until midnight (crunch time!). That's how you get the job done. Every time. Sort of.
I bet some jerk is going to organize a multi agent scrum process at some point and burn some tokens on this nonsense.
If you've never built a complex thing out of wood, I highly recommend it. There's an interesting curve of experience. First you try to build basic things, and it seems kinda easy, everything just works. Then you start trying more advanced things, and it seems like everything gets screwed up constantly. Finally you master the advanced things, and you screw up less and it gets easier.
The same is true of software. At first you try to make software, and you do, and it's kinda easy. Then you try to make more advanced software, and it seems much harder than it should be, as what you think will work doesn't. You spend a lot of time changing your design to make things work, which ends up not being exactly as you thought it should at first. Finally, after you master software development, things get easier and work like you expect.
In both cases, when you are ignorant, you do the wrong thing, and it works despite your ignorance, because you're doing an easy thing in the most straightforward way. But then you get cocky and try things that aren't as easy, and suddenly the straightforward way doesn't work anymore, because complex things never work the way you expect. Finally, after you've screwed up doing the thing enough, you remember what not to do, and now you can do it without the mistakes. But you're just not-screwing-up the things you already screwed up once before. You'll still screw up new things, because you haven't learned them yet. And you'll screw up again when you forget a past screw-up.
What separates the woodworker from the software engineer is, the woodworker doesn't make a lot of different things, and doesn't use a lot of different ways to do it. The software engineer is constantly doing new things, in different ways. So the software engineer is perpetually rising to their level of ignorance, while the woodworker stays mostly within their level of competence.
This is why there is no system in the universe that will be better than any other at software development. Agile, Waterfall, or anything else, doesn't matter. As long as you keep doing new things, you'll never not be screwing up. But stick to one thing and master it, and it doesn't matter how you do it.
This post sets up a straw man from the outset, and only gets worse from there.
I understand how got here, where many experienced software programmers, managers, and bloggers only know capital-A Agile in the watered down version sold via certifications and crummy medium posts.
I can’t even with the pitch into spec driven development as some high watermark of software methodology.
Lucky me, I've never had to say Hi Agile in a first place. It is a tumor. Been in programming since 80s. Mostly on my own except 6 years long stint at the company. Quit in 2000 from position of CTO
at the same time, how can you judge something so harshly if you've never experienced it yourself.
Because I had "pleasure" watching others doing it. One does not have to step into shit personally
I wonder if there is no AI product yet which runs scrum ceremonies, assigns user stories in planning and computes story point velocity after the sprint ends.
That's clearly a human's job. The AI's job is to do the programming.
Absolutely awesome, thank you, Lewis!
I'm of the belief that most project management voodoo is just that - voodoo. There is no rigor, there's no formal basis for ideas, and there's no testing of hypotheses and rejection when evidence counters it.
Engineering (even in computing) has a formal basis and practice. Project management does not. Systems thinking and industrial organizational psychology does, but rarely do you see it applied like bullshit such as agile (and in environments that do - it works spectacularly).
Out with the voodoo, and in with the scientific method, I say.
But if Agile is going to die, what are Scrum Masters going to do?
Same as before: nothing.
Someone once described agile as this: Its just pantomime and posit notes... implying that the process (from the outside) was more performative than anything else.
From "scrum masters" to "planing poker" it's all very silly.
That’s Scrum you are thinking of. Not agile.