'Agile Programming is Not Dead, Quite the Opposite' (heartofagile.com) 216
"Agile is not dead, quite the opposite," argues Alistair Cockburn, one of the co-authors of the original Manifesto for Agile Software Development in 2001:
Why then, do we read of agile's death? Three reasons: phony ads, misunderstanding ordinary movement of ideas through society, and looking at the wrong curves... The sales pitch is pretty obvious when you look for it. Ignore those articles, they are just cheap sales tricks...
The pundits you are reading typically are innovators and early adopters. They adopted agile 10-15 years ago. Quite naturally, they have moved on and are working on the 2nd or 3rd round of interesting things that have arrived since then... They have been looking at lean startup, hypothesis testing, and agile product management, for example. All agile consequences, just a little more advanced. They have quite naturally (for them) forgotten the joy of discovering the agile approach for the first time. Everyone they know is already using it or has moved forward. To them it looks "passé", "dead"...
Choice A: agile. Choice B: something else. What is the something else that you think is more effective? For most projects, I can't think of another way that is more effective. Collaborate, deliver, reflect, improve, in cycles, from first idea until final delivery. This works whatever the nature of the project (no, agile is not just for software). Even badly done agile (please complain away at this moment, it's fine, there is a lot of bad agile out there), tends to be better than whatever came before it. That only tells you how bad all the things were that came before...
Agile is not dead, on the contrary. It's scarcely gotten started. Collaborate, deliver, reflect, and improve, in tight cycles. If you can find something better, use it.
The pundits you are reading typically are innovators and early adopters. They adopted agile 10-15 years ago. Quite naturally, they have moved on and are working on the 2nd or 3rd round of interesting things that have arrived since then... They have been looking at lean startup, hypothesis testing, and agile product management, for example. All agile consequences, just a little more advanced. They have quite naturally (for them) forgotten the joy of discovering the agile approach for the first time. Everyone they know is already using it or has moved forward. To them it looks "passé", "dead"...
Choice A: agile. Choice B: something else. What is the something else that you think is more effective? For most projects, I can't think of another way that is more effective. Collaborate, deliver, reflect, improve, in cycles, from first idea until final delivery. This works whatever the nature of the project (no, agile is not just for software). Even badly done agile (please complain away at this moment, it's fine, there is a lot of bad agile out there), tends to be better than whatever came before it. That only tells you how bad all the things were that came before...
Agile is not dead, on the contrary. It's scarcely gotten started. Collaborate, deliver, reflect, and improve, in tight cycles. If you can find something better, use it.