As Agile as Agile can be

I very much enjoyed the recent ‘Engineering Room’ interview between Dave Farley and Allen Holub. Full marks to both for being honest and forthright in their views and not sugar coating the mess that Agile Methods are in.

My concern was the same I have had with every informed debate on Agile, since I first stumbled onto the C2 Wiki in the late 90’s. In my opinion they all end up orbiting three tautologies:

1. Agile is what successful Agile teams do.
2. Smart people can be empowered to make smart choices.
3. Companies that are ready to succeed with Agile can succeed with Agile.

Now I recognise and respect the problem. As was discussed all Agile Methods started out as approaches that worked on a particular project and with a particular team. But when the lightning was captured in a jar, and then released into a different environment, it didn’t work as well.

Yet commercial pressures mean we persevere and encase the original insights in books, blog posts, training courses and certifications. As a result if you can’t make sparks fly in your team then the assumption will be that you are to blame.

This has been an issue for as long as folks have been arguing about systems. Consider this quote from a famous essay by Bruce Lee:

It is conceivable that a long time ago a certain martial artist discovered some partial truth. During his lifetime, the man resisted the temptation to organize this partial truth, although this is a common tendency in a man’s search for security and certainty in life. After his death, his students took “his” hypothesis, “his” postulates and “his” method and turned them into law. Impressive creeds were then invented, solemn reinforcing ceremonies prescribed, rigid philosophy and patterns formulated, and so on, until finally an institution was erected. So what originated as one man’s intuition of some sort of personal fluidity was transformed into solidified, fixed knowledge, complete with organized classified responses presented in a logical order. In so doing, the well-meaning, loyal followers not only made this knowledge a holy shrine but also a tomb in which they buried the founder’s wisdom.

Folks who dislike Scrum, SAFe and other methods would presumably find common cause with Bruce’s point of view. But unlike him we are part of an industry which is growing explosively whilst undergoing rapid change. I believe we really need some concrete advice to pass on.

So my question in a nutshell is — is this it? Is there nothing beyond the Agile Manifesto, the twelve principles and a handful of troubleshooting techniques that we can pass on to the next generation? Is every software team inevitably drawn into an existential quest to define what Agile means for them? Is there no scaffolding, no rituals, no structured guidance we can dispense that will help the next generation learn from our failures?

Ironically this was the question Bruce Lee was grappling with before his tragic and untimely death. To manage his schools he had to adopt a syllabus and a ranking system, much as he disliked both.

It seems to me that you cannot claim to be a profession without a defined skillset and a quantitative way of measuring skill. So perhaps the failure to codify Agile methods simply reflects our inability to properly define ourselves as a profession?