The Agile Waterfall

People loved (and many of them still love) Agile. It is something like the Holy Grail, it will lead us to a brave new world that development will be a cool and orderly process. To be honest, I like it, but you know there is a saying (at least in Greek):

The difference between theory and practice, is small in theory and big in practice.

So, the whole agile movement got tech by storm. Since the Agile Manifesto, lots of practitioners made their appearance, claiming that they will fix everything on the software development process. Surely, they improved it. A lot. They never ran out of courage, but in the end, they ran out of time.

Organization with software development teams, love on thing above all, deadlines (aka ETAs). The Agile process has another way to deal with this, iterations.

Iterations imply that really there is no strict deadline, you continuously improving what you build for each sprint, until the client is happy. So, in practice, no, or at least very few ETAs. Nobody is really happy, especially traditional departments.

The Trojan Horse

To cope with that, organization did the following; they adopted agile, but they continued to work and design the product/system end-to-end. When you have a complete set of stories, you place them into sprints and ta-da, here is your dealine. The only difference is that you measure it with sprints. This can be labelled as “The Agile Waterfall”. So problem solved, we are back to square zero, with some kind of process.

Can we fix this?

Too late

It seems to me that the Agile community ran out of gas. I do not see lots of innovation in this area and all the practitioners are simply revisiting the same concepts over and over again.

So long, and thanks for the fish

To be honest, I am a big fan of Agile. And I think it is important, for all software development teams to follow, or at least adopt some of the principles, be agile.

But it seems everyone is too busy now and I have not seen lots of tech leaders discuss about it. I am not optimistic, but who knows that the future holds?