Agile: Live Undead

Is Agile dead? Is Agile alive? Is Agile dead and alive? Or is it live undead? An attempt to bury the discussion at least for now.

Agile Live Undead

Agile is dead!

Agile is dead. That’s what they say.

But the fact that everyone is talking about how dead agile is seems to contradict the statement.

Agile is at least alive enough to keep discussing endlessly how dead it is.

Live undead

One of the first music albums I bought as an early teenager from my own pocket money was the epic “Live Undead” by the Thrash Metal band Slayer.1 I was fascinated by the band’s brutal, energetic, dark sound.

Dave Lombardo’s hammering drums, the crazy high pitched riffs of the immortal Jeff Hanneman,2 Tom Araya’s infernal shouting, all coming together in the raw style of a live recording with the audience losing their minds in ecstasy in the background. Pure raw energy!

The album still has a special place in my heart while the irony of the title only caught up on me years later.

Agile is alive!

Does this mean that agile is alive after all?

But then why do people keep calling it dead?

Will this discussion ever die? These questions need answers.

Agile was hyper-alive

Agile was Heavy Metal. More precisely, it started off as a cross-over similar to the Punk Rock-Heavy Metal pile-up that is known as Thrash Metal: Hard Rock engineers’ “getting sh*t done” mixed with methodological anarchy (in a good way). It was project and product management for metalheads.

Early agilists were the rock stars who took home all the groupies and left behind wrecked hotel rooms. At a point all the corporate middle management slowpokes wanted to be like them.

What happened to Agile that now makes it appear “too old, too cold”3 to perform as it did in its youth? Let’s dig deeper … until the shovel hits the coffin.

Why is agile dead?

Things people say about why agile is dead:

  1. Agile doesn’t work
  2. Agile transformations failed
  3. Agile jobs are dead
  4. Agile became main stream
  5. We evolved beyond agile

Agile doesn’t work

Agile is dead because it simply does not work in practice. This is something you hear not only from the corporate sphere (where you would expect it) but also from communities of coders and indiehackers. For some (corporate) agile is still something too wild and anarchic, for others it is ironically still too complicated and process-heavy. Both extremes meet in their contempt for agile processes, methodologies and prescriptions indicating that they don’t deliver on their promises.

Agile transformations failed

Some say that Agile is dead because it got “lost in transformation”. At a point seemingly every corporation or larger company in the developed world started something called an “agile transformation”. These initiatives typically started with great ambitions of changing the whole culture and organization but then failed more or less spectacularly or were quietly buried. In many cases these initatives led to rebranded or revamped forms of corporate bureaucracy as “business agility” which destroyed much of agile’s credibility.4

Agile jobs are dead

Some say Agile is dead in terms of the agile job market. After several cycles and ups and downs it now (early 2024) seems that Agile Coaches, Scrum Masters, Product Owners and other agile roles have gone out of demand. Companies go back to hiring program managers, project managers and the like. “Agile” in a current job posting is an optional add-on rather than a key feature. This is seen as an indicator that companies got tired of agile so much that it is dying from a lack of business support.

Agile became main stream

Others think that agile is dead because it was killed by its own success. It is now the standard and main stream tool that everyone is using. No need to transition to it when it is already commonplace. It made itself obsolete as a dedicated movement. Promoting agile has become like selling snow machines to Antarctica.

We evolved beyond agile

Some say that by now agile is dead because it is not only main stream – but yesterday’s main stream. There are new methods and approaches that grew out of agile or developed independently. On the technical level e.g. the DevOps movement has become a set of methodologies in its own right culminating in BizDevOps. On the other hand, Lean is making a comeback and some understand agile now solely as a sub-set of “Lean”.

Agile is not quite dead

Taking all this criticism into account, it is still not true in all places and contexts. Some people have moved on beyond agile methodologies, found that they are not a good fit for what they do or adapted them to their need to a degree of leaving little of the original content.

How to deal with this complexity?

Pragmatic advice

Taking a pragmatic view, some non-theoretical ideas how to navigate the life-or-death discussion if Agile is dead:

  1. Ignore the “life or death” discussion
  2. Check if agile works for you in your context
  3. See agile as a tool, not a goal in itself
  4. Take a business perspective

Ignore the “life or death” discussion

  • Absolute statements about the life or death of a set of methodologies rarely help to solve concrete problems. What matters is: does agile help you in your particular situation?

Check if agile works for you in your context

  • This means: try it. And try it seriously, with a clear understanding of the expected outcomes and benefits and based on measurable criteria so you can evaluate its impact and make an informed decision if and how to continue with or without it.

See agile as a tool, not a goal in itself

  • A large part of the opinionated discussion around agile comes from jumping to a level of generalization that is inappropriate. Would craftspeople discuss if “hammers are dead” or “we have evolved beyond screwdrivers”? Only if you abstract from the specific craft you are working in and take an view of over-abstraction. Get down to business and ask yourself: What are the tools we need to get the job done – and maybe we need to come up with new, customized tools that no traditional tool maker can offer.

Take a business perspective

  • Before diving head-first into a huge transformation program, be very clear about what you want to achieve with it in business terms. For some organizations transforming to full-blown agility may be exactly what they need. For others there may be points of conflict with their business objectives. Be transparent about these aspects – and involve all levels of your organization that are affected from top management to delivery and operations.

Long live agility!

Eventually, no matter what happens, agile will be un-alive. It is just a matter of time. For now it still has life left in it and can be useful in many ways – depending on context, set and setting.

There is one thing however that will likely never go out of fashion or become completely obsolete: agility!

The ability – as a business, an organization, a team, a team of teams, and even as an individual – to re-focus your attention and action, to shift swiftly and with ease to new opportunities. Agility will never grow old.

So the day will come when it will be right to say: “Agile is dead. Long live agility”.

But it is not this day!

  1. https://www.slayer.net/discography The “Rolling Stone” once called the band “lean, quick, precise and brutal” ↩︎
  2. Hanneman was also heavily involved in writing the lyrics. He sadly passed away too early in 2013, R.I.P. ↩︎
  3. http://www.darklyrics.com/lyrics/darkthrone/toooldtoocold.html ↩︎
  4. The culmination point of the corporate bs reframing of agile was arguably McKinsey’s 2021 idea of an “agile transformation office” copied by legions of other consultancies: https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/people-and-organizational-performance/our-insights/why-an-agile-transformation-office-is-your-ticket-to-real-and-lasting-impact ↩︎