Do You Do Agile?

Agile is represented by 4 values and 12 principles and was gathered around major thought leaders of methods different from the traditional way of work back in the 90's. It was a response to the waterfall way of work, which was directly derived from the production and manufacturing, physical domain world. A lot of people were struggling with this, traditional approach, and projects and the deliveries were failing. The main difference between software development deliveries, compared to the physical domain deliveries is that software can be delivered in fully working parts, and can be easily upgraded and updated. Almost just like LEGO, even better, virtually.

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The reasoning behind this kind of response was very pragmatic, to achieve better results. Doing stuff in different ways, organizing and using different agile approaches and practices, the final results were improving.

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But, to achieve the results, people using these practices needed to DO things. Sometimes, ways of work were failing. Or lessons learned, if we're thinking positively. So, not only experimentation was necessary while creating frameworks and methods, but even today, when we're using these frameworks and methods as is (on the SHU level of SHU-HA-RI), we need to DO things, experiment, and then learn from that experience, to implement these learnings in the new cycle of work and so on.

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In the meantime, agile thing has become a business as well. And it is not bad actually. We have a lot of different trainings available, a lot of consultants of a different experience and knowledge to learn from and to support us. And the most valuable for me is the community. It is not bad, as long as you don't deal with, "agile philosophy" for the purpose of itself. In this case, one usually doesn't have relevant experience working with real challenges and using agile to address them, but mostly preaches agile as a religion and usually says that it is "important to be agile, not doing agile". I agree that it is important to be agile, but without DOING it, and learning from people and experiences, I believe that there's no way for one to be agile.

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For me, I don't care how you call it agile or something else, as long as you achieve results and have a way to inspect and adapt, learn from experience, and improve yourself and others, I'm fine with that. In my opinion, using agile stuff (using this word on purpose to avoid, methods, methodology, framework, and mindset discussions), increases your potential and chances to succeed. if something else is working for you, just keep it going...and improving.

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Usually, people conducting training in an agile domain (including myself) emphasize the last sentence from values:

"That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more."

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Somehow, the first one was missed pretty often, so let me quote it:

"We are uncovering better ways of developing software?by doing it?and helping others do it."

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So, please do agile, introspect and adapt, experiment, learn, and improve. This is the way to become and be agile.