Recursivity.blog()

Agile as we know it is dead. No, not the values, practices or principles.

But the word “Agile” is thoroughly dead. Debased and devalued like a Zimbabwean Dollar - it has become a buzzword so thoroughly abused and misused that it is worthless. Everyone and their mother now claim to be Agile, even in environments where committing a new source file requires approval from three managers, two design authorities and one dog.

I’ve seen a number of places in the past five years where having a meeting in a traditional format is called “having a Scrum”. Where being “Agile” is when you forego all discipline and just go Wild West on code and deployments - even more ironic considering Agile in its original form enforced a stronger set of disciplined practices than any traditional form of project process that simply goes for churning out docs and then hoping for the best.

These days you have “Enterprise Agile Enablement Consultancies”, trying to flog Agile transformation by suboptimizing development teams within an inherently unagile and incompatible organisational context (good luck.. You can’t make one small part of an organisation Agile if the rest of the host body/organisation will reject the foreign change).
You have elephants on clay feet calling themselves “Agile” because it’s the latest buzzword, even though they wouldn’t know what Agile was if it punched them repeatedly in the face.

The word “Agile” means nothing anymore. Agile is dead.