Agile is Dead? Long Live DevOps?

A quick read, from Mathew Kern, on how Agile is part of a hype cycle, and similar to other fads. He has lots of great points, and links to other sources to support his argument.

I believe the author is stating, that Agile, as a marketing term, a sales pitch, or even as a strict practitioner of agile, it has matured and plateaued, and no longer being refined. DevOps is now the "Next Big Thing". Even the creators of Agile, from what I have read, feel that they lost control of the definition, and it was taken over as a marketing tool and do not back it any longer.

I hear many of the same complaints about DevOps, that there is no such things as a DevOps engineer or a DevOps Department, it is a frame of mind, a culture or a way of operating with good spirit, not a bunch of tools, specialized people, a framework, or a business process to follow to a T.

One of the core points of the agile manifesto is people over process, and from a marketing perspective, I have seen that rule erased, with folks only caring about following the process and not ideals while, wrapping waterfall methodologies around it.

So is agile dead in the sense of people following the core principles and applying them? No I think not, but as far has being a thing to sell, a current hot topic, a certified agile engineer or other marketing terms, it has been lost to DevOps which is on the same path.

 I myself, have taken many of the core things that I like about Agile, and adopted them to work in a engineering operations environment, where there is some coding, but mostly infrastructure work, thrown in with unplanned work. We run multiple sprints, have many epics for things like virtualization, storage, AWS, monitoring, and typical work that needs to get done. We also have epics to track long term project work for near and short term. 

Does any of this fit within the strict Agile work, not even close, but I have lead to develop and refine it over the last few years and I think it works pretty well. We have much greater insight into or work load, how many hours we can allocate to system engineers, and have a good idea of our backlog of work. Things are not perfect and we still have gaps to address, but we are creative. And the daily standups I used to run, are still sitdowns, and run less than 15 min typically every day.

At the end, it is not Agile in the marketing sense but a philosophy which will be adapted to other future trends.