This Is Not Agile

The loop feels sophisticated, but it is just two steps drawn in a fancy way. If we stretch it, we have one old friend: The waterfall.

I probably do not need to say this, right? There is something wrong with Agile, and you have suffered it. I have seen plenty of articles on Medium about it. Some saying how you should do it, others saying what you shouldn’t do, and many others saying that you should not do Agile at all. The problem is that Agile is more of a mindset rather just a recipe, and that is difficult to communicate. Instead, this time, in this article, I will share some basics insights to help you understand what Agile truly aims for, by showing what the drawings are really depicting, and I will provide some few more resources.

Classic Agile miss-representation.

This is the drawing from the story image, the one that I am telling you that it is not Agile. Yet, if you do a quick search on Google images, you will find a lot of figures just like this one.

Well, they are all wrong.

Some terminology varies; sometimes testing is also in the loop, and sometimes is deployment instead of verification —however, the deployment shown requires an approval gate that verifies the content—. Yet, the fundamental structure remains the same: it begins with a step where the business team decides the next feature, followed by the assumption that the developer team works in an Agile process, and finally, developers deliver their work, and some other team —often from business side— decides its readiness.

Now comes the point where the interpretation of this drawing is important. It turns out that there are two main interpretations, and both depend on how we read the “develop loop”. The first assumes that there is one iteration, the second that there are several iterations.

Sadly, there are several articles, and consultants, around doing the first interpretation: assuming that there is only one cycle in the development loop. Or, in other words, they explain this process as starting with requirements, completing a single loop through development, and directly…