“Agile” is everywhere and for good reasons.
If only you could reverse-engineer all that agility and mass-reproduce it.
Specialists and experts alike have been working hard at it, playbooks in hand, with tools in tow and metrics to boot.
You will want to follow their lead but the truth is, you will be misguided.
You will be misguided because Agile is first and foremost about people, and people choosing their own path and honing their own practices—not yours, mine, or anyone else’s.
Detach your thinking from any particular named ‘Agile’ method.”
—Ron Jeffries, Developers Should Abandon Agile (2018)
Sure, why start from scratch when you can use the “tried and tested” from people who have “been there, done that”? By all means, use it.
But what really matters is people. People who take pride in what they do. People with the drive to work out and perfect the way they work. That, and an environment where they can settle in and thrive.
If you’re doing Extreme Programming the same way as you were doing it a year ago, you’re no longer doing Extreme Programming.”
—Martin Fowler, The State of Agile Software in 2018
Then, with the right people and the right environment, with time and effort, Agile will come into its own: not a cookie-cutter rubric of Scrum and so-called Stories, but instead an elegant and powerful mix of practices you proudly call your own.
