Two months ago InfoQ reported on Jim Shore's popular article The Decline and Fall of Agile, which highlighted a propensity in our growing community for organizations to adopt "Agile" (in name) but fail to adopt what it really means to be Agile (in practice). That article, both on InfoQ and on Jim's blog, garnered huge response and is worth checking out if you had not already.
But, alas, the saga continues. Community leaders such as Martin Fowler, Joshua Kerievsky, Ron Jeffries, and others have taken Shore's initial stance a few steps further recently, posting their own thoughts on what's going on with this situation.
In his Flaccid Scrum article, Martin Fowler largely re-iterates Shore's sentiment that often what's lacking in many Agile adoptions is a take-on of the technical practices highlighted by Extreme Programming, such as pair programming, continuous integration, and test-driven development. Like Shore, Fowler acknowledges how this is most prevalent in organizations choosing Scrum as their preferred methodology, but that even so that this is not the fault of Scrum in and of itself. As a remedy and reminder, he emphasizes that (among other things) people leading these Scrum adoptions be extra mindful to push appropriate technical practices:
The scrum community needs to redouble its efforts to ensure that people understand the importance of strong technical practices. Certainly any kind of project review should include examining what kinds of technical practices are present. If you're involved or connected to such a project, make a fuss if the technical side is being neglected.
Fowler adds also a good reminder that at the heart of of any successful, or any failed, agile adoption are the people behind it; it is the team that brings success or failure.
Just after Fowler published this article, Industrial Logic and IXP founder Joshua Kerievsky brought the topic to the XP Yahoo Group. In his initial posting, the Whole Enchilada, Kerievsky reprised a message he had first given the community at Agile 2006 in a hugely popular talk by the same name, the message largely being "do it all, and do it all from the start":
Flaccid Scrum? The Decline and Fall of Agile?
More evidence that organizations and development communities need a Whole Enchilada -- managerial and technical agility, not just one or the other.
The idea that "they will just evolve to adopt the technical stuff" is, in my humble opinion and experience, a naive assumption. Most of the time, that adoption either doesn't happen or happens so haphazardly that it is as if it never happened at all.
Scrum out of the box says nothing about technical agility. It is like selling a car without seat belts and other critical safety features. You need to be lucky enough to know the right Scrum people who will tell you that you need the technical stuff too (though even they make believe in this "later adoption phase" idea).
XP (which, as we on this list know, is way more than just technical practices), Scurm+XP, IndustrialXP, etc., are examples of Whole Enchiladas.
We find again and again that organizations and development communities are far better off beginning with Whole Enchiladas then waiting for them to discover how utterly insufficient their agile process is.
So we need to acknowledge that good processes address critical things and technical agility is most definitely a critical thing in software development. It is ill-advised to defer it to a later adoption phase.
Kerievsky's post kicked off a whirlwind of intense discussion, approximately 90 entries debating the merits and applicability of Joshua's suggestion, as well as various possible reasons why adopting the Whole Enchilada does or does not actually happen in so many organizations, and more. The thread is a must read.
In his article Context, My Foot!, Ron Jeffries agrees with Shore, Fowler, and Kerievsky that at the heart of most failed agile adoptions is a failure to adopt all that's really needed to truly be agile:
You have to do right things, and you have to do things right, in order to succeed.
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In order to do Scrum or XP or any form of Agile successfully, you must refactor. Sorry, not optional. Necessary.
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There are many more practices, generally outlined in XP and elsewhere, that are just as essential as this one. There really is no choice. If you want to succeed, you’ve just gotta do them.
But the real gem in Jeffries' post comes after his spin on the "ya gotta do the whole enchilada" message, when he explains what might really be at the heart of organizations' failure to adopt all that agile is: the organization itself. Pointing to the pink elephant in the room, Jeffries says:
As XP / Agile / Scrum have become more popular, many teams and individuals have wanted to do them, or “be” them. This has led to a school of Agile methods that wants to be called “context dependent”. The idea is that whatever brand of Agile is under discussion is “too rigid” and “doesn’t fit our context”. So we have to modify Agile because God knows we can’t modify our context.
Well, my dear little children, I’ve got bad news for you. It is your precious context that is holding you back. It is your C-level Exeuctives and high-level managers who can’t delegate real responsibility and authority to their people. It is your product people who are too busy to explain what really needs to be done. It is your facilities people who can’t make a workspace fit to work in. It is your programmers who won’t learn the techniques necessary to succeed. It is your managers and product owners who keep increasing pressure until any focus on quality is driven out of the project.
So, this discussion is one that deserves plenty of attention - Agile is at a critical point. The experts we look to for direction continue to talk about it, and you should too. We all should. Do so here.