Hi Chris,

I thought a lot about what you have said several times.

Agile indeed seems a bad deed. Something so difficult to apply might not be good, neither scalable.

Yet... after years I arrived to the following conclusion. I quote Robert C. Martin:

«It's a sad fact of our industry that the names of good things pretty quickly lose their meaning because people steal those names, in order to steal the good reputation.»

And basically, what I find here is that Agile has lost his meaning. When people decide to apply Agile ignoring its most basic definitions, they lose most of its meaning.

And I believe that how it happens is very quickly. You are a company that you have heard from others about something called Agile, and that it worked well. But you do not have the expertise, so you look for a consultant. The problem, is that because you do not know what to expect, you cannot evaluate if the consultant is doing a good job, so you look for some kind of indicator that seems good for you. And given that you have been working with Product Production techniques all your life, with deadlines, processes, etc. that is what you use to evaluate the consultants that will lead the transformation of your company. And as the closer is the definitive structure of your company, the more suitable feels to you.

And on the other side, you are a consultant, and you want to sell your services. And you may have learned about Agile, and you understand what it means, how it can boost the productivity, but you also need to sell your services. So, when you are hired, you sweeten some of the concepts so your transformation moves along the expectations of your client, you compromise.

But when that happens, it opens a door so many other people can enter. You are lowering the barrier, and you are letting anyone who does not understand, or do not even know, its basics to come to the market. And at that point, any charlatan can enter into the game, sell its services, and the best trait that he needs to sell its, it is not deep knowledge of Agile, but a deep understanding of what the other manager of the other company wants to buy.

And I guess that this is the way that lead to very successful (selling the framework, not getting results) pretending Agile frameworks like SAFe. And I point to it, because having the development split into two PI (one product and one delivery) , and each PI often about 10 weeks, it means that delivering one feature may take around six months. That is three more times of the maximum time suggested by the Agile Manifesto back in 2001. For me is the perfect example of the triumph of the framework sales department over the benefit of the client.

Yet, this is what I really thought what it is happening. As I said in the article, I believe that we are confusing astrology with astronomy.

But, somehow, I have observed that, it does not matter how bad is the Agile implementation, pseudo Agile practices are always more effective than keeping the old waterfall system.

Probably that is why Agile never gets "perfect", because it works, even when it is not perfect, and as much as it may be hard for us to accept.

Yet, there always be people seeing the old opportunity and yelling to fix it when we have all the tools on top of the table for more than two decades.

I do not know if you also share this point of view. I believe that Agile feels complicated, because as I pointed, it goes against everything that we have taught, and change, it makes a hole inside us. So, yes, it becomes hard to use. But I think that also the market, and the lack of a real authenticity mark, has laid this jungle.

Thanks a lot for your comment, and thanks for leading me to this thought. What do you think?