Elephants in the Room – What Agile Practitioners Don’t Talk About

Agile development has proven to be successful yet there are "elephants in the room" - things agile practitioners don't talk about but that need to be addressed. Those things range from the role of technical architecture and design to elitism in the agile community and adherence to agile dogma even when it doesn’t make sense.

No assessment of the agile movement can be complete without frank discussion of the faults and self-delusions that the movement has inspired. At the 10 Years of the Agile Manifesto conference [1] last month there was just such a discussion. One way to address these issues (in the agile spirit of transparency) is to name them and then state what needs to be done to correct them. Two of the conference’s four recommendations for the future of the agile movement came about because of this discussion. Those recommendations were to demand technical excellence, and to organize knowledge and improve education.

[ I do lively presentations on this and related topics [2] - mhugos@yahoo.com [3] ]

Fixing Agile Shortcomings Starts by Admitting They Exist

One of the big “elephants in the room” that people don’t want to talk about is a lack of software engineering and system design skills which agile practitioners need to posses in order to deliver the value that they claim to deliver. Another issue is the tendency in the agile movement to espouse agile values but then not live by them (as in refuse to practice transparency and continuous improvement in skills and education).

And people agreed that there is a problem with contextual applicability. As one person put it, “context gets in the way of the dogma.” There is a tendency in the agile movement to simply repeat the party line and not consider situations where the dogma may not be relevant, or situations where typical agile approaches are not appropriate. A transcript of this discussion is shown below and you can also SEE A SHORT VIDEO OF THE CONVERSATION [4] on YouTube.

David Anderson – What we’re talking about now is what is it about our community that’s preventing us from talking about…

Russ Rufer – And I’m saying maybe let’s go beyond that and talk about them and we need that conversation…

David - Okay, can I summarize the list I’ve got?

Ryan Martens – Can you put them on the wall too? Could you do it?

David – Yeh, I mean we can, right so…

Ryan – Just stick them over the agenda.

David – So right now on the list we’ve got, and they’re in no particular order: Agile Alliance; role of architecture and design; self-organizing teams… ah so in some cases these are place holders for, like, something we know doesn’t always work but we kinda pretended it did…

Tracy Bialik – Yeh

David - … elitism; business value; the naiveté we’ve had around scaling and some of the fairly naïve advice we’ve been giving out; commercial interests…

Andrew Shafer – That’s scaling organizations and applications right?

Ryan – That what works at the team level necessarily works at the org level.

Andrew – Alright, so it’s the same with applications.

Tracy – Yeh, yeh

David - …commercial interests that have sanctioned the discussion of failure; technical debt; there’s been this core anarchism ethic in the community and there’s some positives and negatives, and we’ve really been incapable of properly introspecting on that.

There’s been a lot of hypocrisy; you know, I espouse agile values, but I don’t live by them myself, that’s a problem.

And then there’s context and contextual applicability and a lack of willingness to discuss it. I had put, had the summary of, “context gets in the way of the dogma.” So part of our role has been to promote dogma in the community. We don’t want a contextual discussion.

Then there’s culture, and is there any other ones Philippe?

Philippe Kruchten – No, no that’s good.

[ Michael Hugos is principal at Center for Systems Innovation [c4si]; [2] finding elegant solutions to complex problems; mentoring teams in agile systems development. His newest book is Business in the Cloud: What Every Business Needs to Know about Cloud Computing [5].]