The Future of Agile Isn’t Shit: The TL;DR Summary

The agile market has been in a downturn since mid-2023. Common questions that I get these days are “What has happened to Agile?”, “As an agile coach, what can I do to find work now?”, and “What is the future of agile?” To answer these questions I wrote a series of articles on LinkedIn in August and September of 2024.  I call this my “agile scatological” series because of their names, as you’ll soon see below. This blog posting summarizes the three articles as well as links to a short summary video. I hope you find these articles insightful and helpful.

The Future of Agile: How We Got Here

The first article was The Agile Community Shat The Bed. The article explained why the agile gold rush is over and how we, as a community, willingly dug this hole for ourselves. The primary mistakes that we made were:

  1. Too much agile certification, not enough education. Too many agile certifications were bought, rather than earned. Worse yet, they tended to focus on agile frameworks rather than fundamental concepts and skills. Hiring organizations finally figured this out and now see that the vast majority of agile certifications are effectively meaningless.
  2. Too much framework adoption, not enough improvement. Many “agile transformations” tended to focus on adoption of an agile framework, in particular Scrum or SAFe, rather than transforming enterprises into learning organizations. Then, when the frameworks didn’t deliver on their promises, agile was an easy target to blame.
  3. Too much fluff, not enough stuff. Many agile coaches preferred to focus on soft skills, which are clearly important, rather than hard “technical” skills. Both are needed, but unfortunately too few coaches had the ability to deliver advice on the hard stuff.
  4. Too much purity, not enough agility. Many agilists wanted to focus on following an ideal interpretation of the Manifesto for Agile Software Development or the framework they’d been trained in.  Sadly, this was wishful thinking at best because it didn’t reflect reality on the ground. A hybrid approach tailored to your context was far more effective in practice rather than a “pure agile” approach.
  5. Too many fads, not enough grounding. Over the past two decades fads have come and gone within the agile movement. Although they all had value to a certain extent, but when applied too much, too fervently, too naively, or simply out of context they proved to not deliver on their promises. What does work are strategies chosen for, and tailored to, the changing context that a team faces.

The Future of Agile: How to Dig Yourself Out

The second article was How Agilists Can Move Forward After Shatting the Bed. This article recognized that although agile isn’t dead, it’s going to be a rough couple of years for a lot of people. The market has changed, and we must change to meet the new environment that we face.  My primary suggestions are:

  1. It may be time to consider a career change. The future of agile may not include you, which is hard but important to hear. For many people it’s time to refocus and choose a new career path.
  2. You must add real value. Your organization expects you to add value in whatever role you fill. More importantly, you should do so visibly and better yet measurably. Many agile practitioners struggled to meet this criteria in practice, and thus were made redundant.
  3. Coaches must help organizations learn to improve. The reason why organizations invest in new ways of working (WoW), and new ways of thinking (WoT), is to improve their effectiveness. Their goal isn’t to adopt agile, nor an agile framework, but rather to improve. That’s a very important nuance.
  4. Some agilists may become enterprise designers. For a small number of people who really do want to help improve organizations at the enterprise level, the future of agile for them may be to become enterprise designers.

The Future of Agile: How The Agile Movement Should Evolve

The Future of Agile Isn’t Shit finished the trilogy. This article describes how I see the agile movement evolving over the next few years, and what I intend to do to help things along. The article describes how:

  1. We will move beyond manifestos. The Manifesto for Agile Software Development was an incredible artifact in its time, but it that time is long gone. I doubt that the future of agile includes an updated manifesto let alone a new one. I may be wrong about this, but I doubt it.
  2. We will focus on software development. Many of us will choose to go back to fundamentals, and I think that’s great. Helping to improve software development is always a good thing.
  3. We will go beyond software development. Many of us will also choose to continue to extend agile in non-software contexts, and that’s great too.
  4. We must put agile techniques into context. Any technique, regardless of it’s level of agility (whatever that means), works well in some situations and poorly in others. To properly adopt and apply a technique, contextual tailoring advice is critical.
  5. I will evolve my own work. I have maintained and evolved both Agile Modeling and Agile Data over the years. Lately I’ve deprioritized that work a bit because I’ve been in school working on a Master degree in AI, but that will finish by the end of 2024. So starting in early 2025, you’ll start seeing more updates and new material.
  6. We will not start a new gold rush. If you’re hoping for the good old days to come back, they won’t.  The future of agile is value and content, there’s some gold to be made there but it won’t come in a rush.

Video: The Future of Agile Isn’t Shit

If this article is still too much for you to read, you may find this video to be good option.

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