GoKawiilSaying Goodbye to Agile
RIP Agile, we hardly knew ye.
And I mean that literally - because no one was ever clear on what it was.
Agile washed over our industry like a tsunami. But whenever it was questioned, a voice (perhaps emanating from a gap in the clouds?) would invariably tell us "ah, but that is not True Agile - The Manifesto sayeth naught of Daily Standups, nor Agile Coaches". Yet if one read the Agile Manifesto (2001), this wellspring of our enlightened New Era of Software, one inevitably found it didn't actually tell us much at all. At best it was a sequence of vague platitudes ("Customer collaboration over contract negotiation"), and at worst it was commercially unworkable ("Welcome changing requirements, even late in development").
So if the Agile Industry was not doing Agile Properly, and the manifesto itself was near devoid of meaning, then what exactly was it?
"A spectre is haunting Software, the spectre of Waterfall"
Agile was always defined primarily in terms of what it wasn't - and what it wasn't was Waterfall. If you were not doing Agile, you are doing Waterfall, and Waterfall Did Not Work.
Except we'd known Waterfall did not work since 1970; and Winston W. Royce laid out exactly why, recommending we instead:
Start with a program design.
Make a prototype of the software to gather information to refine requirements.
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