You are Dead to Me
Agile marketeers have been hocking agile to large scale enterprises for more than a quarter of a century. 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 economically sound.. Agile never promised a plethora of tools that would be required to preside over an agile engineering discipline. In fact, the Agile Alliance 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: It's an unmanageable proposition, especially when the cost of the tools compel the enterprise to fire all of the project managers in the interest of balancing the financials, after opening the coffers to buy all of the 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 a legitimate term - Agile Management?),We rarely see any integrated management in enterprise Agile rollouts. Instead we have clueless Scrum Masters who know nothing about traditional project management, and typically 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.
The 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 are 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.
Isnt it time?
Agile is getting old, yet it hasn't matured. Isn't it time for a facelift for Agile?
Or, in the alternative, isn't it time 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, and shake off the technology monkey that has taken a ride on the backs of software engineers at no small cost? AI should fill many gaps. AI can be our DevOps if employed strategically to automate the DevOps activities, simplifying CI/CD pipelines and take software engineers out of that tedious and time-consuming activity.
