You are Dead to Me

For the reader who has read my "Dirty Little Secret" essay on this site, you will not be surprised to hear me say this:  Enterprise Agile is dead to me!

For goodness sake, software engineering and IT have been hocking agile for 22 years.  What has it yielded?  I'll wait.

To reiterate, Agile is fine for startups and green-field development, but even then, it can be argued that the cost of spinning up an Agile practice is not justifiable.  Agile never promised a plethora of tools that would be required to preside over an agile engineering discipline.  In fact, the Agile Allience abundantly rejected tools in favor of personal interactions.  Yet in practice most companies adopting Agile quickly outfit their Agile practice with a large acquisition of tools:

1. Tools for CI/CD aka pipelines, with not less than 1/2 dozen tools required.

2. Tools for Agile Management (is this even legitimate, as we rarely see any integrated management in enterprise Agile rollouts. Instead we have clueless Scrum Masters who know knothing about traditional project management, and have even less knowledge or experience with agile management)

  a. We get JIRA, Confluence, Service Now, and others.

3. Tools built on top of CI/CD tooling to address legacy concerns that traditional CI/CD tooling does not handle. Worse still, everything happens at the same time, so there is no ability to assess impact or incorporate any planning into the  "Agile Transformation" - a term that I am quite certain means "Suicide" in The Oxford English Dictionary.

Tooling required does come with not only up-front costs and maintenance and leasing costs, but there are also integration costs that are not typically well understood.  These often get bundled into the term DevOps, but these DevOps concerns oare often manifested in roadblocks, which cannot be easily quantified, nor circumnavigated in highly controlled or even regulated enterprise environments. The costs add up, but no one is responsible for tracking the overall costs of engineering around the requirements imposed by Enterprise Agile and it's requisite tooling.

Given these findings.  I can easily say, that Enterprise Agile is dead to me.  I hope that the reader finds this information of benefit.

bMoreov, isnt it time that Agile had a facelift, or f, in the alternative, for smart engineers start to look beyond agile?  Facing the facts, it is clear - Agile is not the holy Grail of software engineering discipline. Instead of feeding the beast that is Agile, shouldn't we be seeking to feed our Customers and users once and for all, rather than a technology monkey that  has taken a rid on our backs?

A Dirty Little Secret

The world over, companies are embracing the Agile Revolution.  All software engineering is relegated to agile practices. Sounds good, right?

Wrong.  Agile is not a one-size fits all solution.  It is not even a methodology.  Agile is only a set of guidelines.  Most companies embracing agile have no appreciation for the pitfals that come with agile.  Invariably, many companies will embrace the SCRUM methodology in some form or other.  Unfortunately, SCRUM is not really a methodology either.  Rather, it is a further set of guidelines and rituals that may be adopted.

There is a dirty little secret about SCRUM and Agile.  The only promise that the agile alliance makes is that there is an emphasis on working software.  This is a good thing, right? Not exactly.  

In practice, SCRUM and Agile are pitched to corporate executives with the promise of greater efficience (read: cost savings).  The dirty little secret is that there are virtually no successful agile implementations of Agile methods in the corporate world.  Large corporations come replete with a set of challenges that Agile is not equipped to address. Namely, large corporations have the challenge of large amounts of legacy and commercial software  products which may be highly customized and integrated into a vast web of complexity.  Furthermore, corporate software may have evolved over years, or even decades such that the underlying business rules which prompted the development of various features of the applications are not well understood.  These software modules are typically very poorly documented and it is prohibitive to reverse engineer the software, and the time and budget to do this is typically astronomical.

The bottom line, is that the "experts" pitching agile to corporations are selling snake oil.  There is literally not one large corporation the world over that can point to any successful agile implementation at corporate scale with the possible exceptions of Amazon and Ali Baba, both are arguably green-field, startups, which is the sweet-spot for agile approaches.  When you have no legacy software, no installed base, and no contractual commitments whatsoever, agile can work brilliantly, but established corporations are being blind-sided by agilists who promise the world only to deliver nothing of value.