I posted a tweet & mentioned “the state of Agile” with an obvious negative overtone. I was attacked for having done so, not coincidentally by a CST. Interestingly, I had never said what “the state of Agile” was.
I realized this morning that I hear two groups of people talking about “the state of Agile.” One group thinks it’s great. This is mostly trainers from Scrum Alliance, Scrum.inc/org, SAFe, LeSS, Agile tools. Surveys show how Agile is everywhere with the presumption that that’s good, but w/o a question of how good Agile is being done. Everything seems to be wonderful in Agile land. But another group doesn’t seem to be so happy. These are mostly the practitioners. Many from very successful, growing companies.
My own view is that we’ve stagnated. That the focus is on frameworks & certifications & not directly working on the problem at hand-identifying the work to be done such as decomposing it into small pieces & getting value realized. Few people leave initial training being able to do this even tho it’s possible to accomplish this with ATDD integrated into initial training
The idea to start out with frameworks instead of the meat of the work is an unvalidated hypothesis.
I believe there’s a better way. Agile has been great-but it can be better