With the rise of critical writing like Bertand Meyer’s Agile! The Good, the Hype, and the Ugly, Daniel Mezick’s Agile-Industrial Complex, and my own Fragile Manifesto, it’s easy to conclude the this Agile thing is getting tired. We’re comfortable enough now with the values and principles of the manifesto that, even if software has exited the perennial crisis, we still have problems, we’re willing to criticise our elders and betters rather than our own practices.
It’s perhaps hard to see from this distance, but the manifesto for Agile Software Development was revolutionary when it was published. Not, perhaps, among the people who had been “doing it and helping others to do it”.
Nor, indeed, would it have been seen as revolutionary to the people who were supposed to read it at the time. Of course we value working software over comprehensive documentation. Our three-stage signoff process for the functional specification before you even start writing any software is because we want working software. We need to control the software process so that non-working software doesn’t get made. Yes, of course working software is the primary measure of progress. The fact that we don’t know whether we have any working software until two thirds of the project duration is passed is just how good management works.
At one point, quite a few years after the manifesto was published and before everybody used the A-word to mean “the thing we do”, I worked at a company with a very Roycean waterfall process. The senior engineering management came from a hardware engineering background, where that approach to project management was popular and successful (and maybe helpful, but I’m not a hardware engineer). To those managers, Agile was an invitation for the inmates to take over the asylum.
Developers are notoriously fickle and hard to manage, and you want them to create their own self-organising team? Sounds like anarchy! We understand that you want to release a working increment every two to four weeks with a preference toward the shorter duration, but doesn’t that mean senior managers will spend their entire lives reviewing and signing off on functional specifications and test plans?
The managers who were open to new ideas were considering the Rational Unified Process, which by that time could be defined as Agile for the “nobody ever got fired for buying an IBM” crowd:
That software engineering department now has different management and is Agile. They have releases at least every month (they already released daily, though those releases were of minimal scope). They respond to change rather than follow a plan (they already did this, though through hefty “change control” procedures). They meet daily to discuss progress (they already did this).
But, importantly, they do the things they do because it helps them release software, not because it helps them hit project milestones. The revolution really did land there.
