Nader K. Rad

Re: Is Agile dead?

2024-07-01

I just read an article titled Are Agile and Scrum Dead? (archived version) by Mike Cohn, one of the most excellent and respectable experts in Agile.

Mike explained that many people say that Agile and Scrum are dead. He believes that these two names won't be mentioned much anymore, not because they are rejected, but because they have become an integral, fundamental part of normal work. In his opinion, Agile has become so omnipresent that it doesn't need to be named anymore.

Well, I respectfully disagree with the main message :)
Let me explain why.

The scope

Despite what some people claim, Agile is useful in a few types of projects, such as IT development, but not all. For example, I've explained before why Agile doesn't work in construction projects.

I haven't seen Mike make any such claims, but he has such an assumption implied in his recent article. If we are talking about all projects, Agile is not the norm at all. I think he's only talking about IT development, so, the rest of this article will be focused on those projects.

The hype cycle

What has happened in reality is that we've passed the peak of the Agile hype. I think the Gartner hype cycle shows this well:

Gartner Hype CycleInnovationtriggerPeak of inflatedexpectationsTrough ofdisillusionmentSlope ofenlightenmentPlateau ofProductivityCurrent status of Agile(In my opinion)VisibilityTime

This trend happens with many topics; people get too excited about something (especially those who don't understand the subject well enough), so much so that they sometimes become annoying and unreasonable. Yes, this topic is AI now.

After the hype

Three years ago, I claimed that Agile had become the status quo; i.e., we had passed the peak of the hype. This means that we've gotten as close as possible to its omnipresence, but we always have so much diversity that true omnipresence is nearly impossible.

However, the semi-omnipresence of Agile in IT development projects is temporary. Logically, Mike's vision of a permanent or long-term omnipresence of Agile is possible but unlikely.

In reality, when a modern concept passes the peak of its hype, it doesn't remain omnipresent, but people let it synthesize with the traditional alternative and create something new. The new, postmodern concept gradually replaces the modern one.

The postmodern alternative gradually grows. After a while, it becomes so powerful that people are practically forced to accept it, and that's the point where it's seen as the new tradition and a new modern concept arises to fight it and make it weaker. When it becomes weak enough, the next postmodern concept is created, and the cycle repeats itself.

The new thing

Mike asks a good question: if Agile is rejected, what is the new thing that has replaced it? He is asking the question for the theory that Agile is rejected and people are using "waterfall" instead. But his question also applies to my claim.

We may not have a clear replacement now because

Conclusion

I think Mike overestimates the longevity of Agile. That doesn't mean that Agile is not worthy, but it's the way everything works and allows us to grow faster. We should accept that Agile, like everything else, had positive and negative impacts. We should learn from all those impacts and use them as a source of inspiration for the next things we build.

Updates

I see more and more articles about this subject. I'm going to list the most notable ones here:

These are recent articles that have a different perspective on the same phenomena I'm discussing here. There were other opinions about its death for other reasons, such as what's explained in Dave Thomas's 2015 conference recording, but I'm not going to list any of those here.

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