AGILE-ist, live your love, not profess it.

I was cycling back from the bakery this morning, listening to?Brene Brown's interview?with Bono on his book "Surrender" (an inspiring and insightful book, by the way). Brene quoted Bono, "You want people to live their love, not profess it", a quote in the context of Bono's and The Edge's struggle with religion, religious institutions, and being part of a successful rock band.

That little quote wrapped up my growing discomfort with the truckload of Paris-Olympics-sharp-shooting-hand-in-the-pocket-silver-medalist memes that have flooded social media lately. In one way or another, all these memes passing by on my LinkedIn feed boil down to "my methodology is better than yours".

There were times in my career when I've passionately advocated and evangelized about "Agile", especially during the early days of Agile. I'm happy it never got to the level of methodological fundamentalism, but passion brings you close. I was blessed that the organizations and people I worked with were brutally real and imperfect. It forced me to see that you don't learn to ride a bike by reading a book about it but by doing it, falling, getting up, falling, getting up, again and again, until the bike becomes part of you. This learn-to-bike metaphor applies perfectly to applying agility in an organization. The scar tissue reminds you of the imperfect ride to competence. Although I can still speak passionately about "down to earth" agile development, I left my silver bullets home years ago.

Thank you, Kent (and friends), for living your love

I first learned about agile when I read Kent Beck's book "Extreme Programming Explained" 25 years ago. Those were the days when the answer to failing software projects was "Process! Process! Process!". Every company was obsessed with CMM certification and implementing the Rational Unified Process. XP took the opposite direction, not taken seriously by anybody, being the laughing stock of all the big players in Tech at the time. I won't lose myself in telling a history of Agile here. I want to stick to what it did to me and why I grew tired of all the Agile BS that has dominated our industry for a while now.

Kent Beck and the two other "founding fathers" of XP, Ward Cunningham, and Ron Jeffries, influenced me more than anybody else in the Agile "elite". Reading their work was refreshing and heartwarming. XP was getting back to the basics of building software that users love. For developers, by developers. There is no complicated framework, no formal roles and responsibilities, just a simple set of principles and practices centering around user intimacy and the incremental exploration of the unknown as software emerges. Incremental to the core, disciplined, quality first. XP made planning poker, TDD, refactoring, pair programming, and CI a thing, laying the foundation of what is considered best practice today. Those practices triggered controversy and turf wars, but the gospel did move the needle and drove evolution in the trenches of Agile software development.

I followed Beck's writing of his latest book, "Tidy Frist?" on?Substack,?and he's still walking the talk, not only in how he writes software but also in how he writes books. He's living his love.

No thank-you, consultants, for professing

I guess XP was too nerdy for a big commercial breakthrough. The target audience was the developers. They are not the kind of people who read many books or sign up for formal training. Scrum - the most known agile methodology - brought a different perspective to the process toolbox: the project management & management perspective. A valuable perspective is key to scaling and connecting to the business side. That audience, those guys do read books, love processes, roles, and responsibilities, and love training and certifications!

That is where Agile went down a slippery slope where all kinds of charlatans and consultants followed the money by selling silver bullets, while blaming failure on the lack of professionalism of those in the trenches. And when, in 2011, SAFe was launched as an answer to the unanswered challenge of scaling agile methods, I knew we were back at the start, as SAFe was no more than RUP dressed up as agile. Agile, as intended, was dead. I survived a company that applied SAFe, the company itself did not.

Since then, my allergy to all the Agile professing BS has made me very careful in how I help the organizations I work for, becoming more nimble and lean. I avoid the burned-out agile lingo as much as possible and explicitly blend concepts and practices as they apply to the context at hand. I now, better than ever before, understand why Kent Beck was so passionate about refusing to call XP a methodology in the early days of XP.