Agile is not a Fucking Noun!

and you sound dumb when you say it like that.

Let’s go back to 1999 ..

ٍSoftware development was becoming a mainstream track and software projects had a good reputation for being badly done. They were extremely late, buggy and with lots of cost overruns. There was no good structure for an efficient software project.

:: Software development looked something like this

Do or Die Development..that shit wasn’t sustainable

So people looked for inspiration in Engineering Project Management .

…Copying this model in Software didn’t workout so well.

Software Changes..a lot

There is a fundamental problem with this Engineering mindset.

in order to come up with a plan you needed a clear and detailed understanding of what you needed to be building.

This is not how software works. Requirements change rapidly even on a weekly basis if not daily.

:: UMLs were cool back then, remember the fucking UMLs?

“Let’s change the specs”

Lot’s of team leads and developers didn’t like where the software world was heading, they asked a simple question..

How can we cut down on all of the bullshit and actually write sustainable software

Books were written on new concepts to build a better process.

books written at the end of the 90s — early 2000

In Feb 2001, 17 Developers met for 2 days to bring forth the famously known Agile Manifesto

They understood that successful software projects had this in common.

1. A good group of people who work together at a human level.
2. They figure out the process that works for them and for the current problem they are working on.
3. and that was it.

Seriously, that was it.

SERIOUSLY THAT WAS JUST FUCKING IT!!

Since then the values had been totally lost in the implementation.

What started out a simple adjective, with time grew to be a meaningless noun used by consultants, authors and developers

And Agile became a fucking industry..

Enter Complexity 2.0 — the root of all evil.

The cool words..

It’s time to reclaim Agility.

Find out what works best for your team and the current problem you are trying to solve. Your process should change with time, if it doesn’t then something is going wrong.

Great companies understand this very well. They provide autonomy for their teams to choose what works for them.

No Process is Universal. It always depends on the context.

Don’t let people put you down just cause you don’t do lean or agile. You don’t need velocity, daily stand ups, points estimations, spikes, scrum masters to deliver high quality software. You just need good people .

– Magdoub