(2014-03-30) Hadlow Coconut Headphones Why Agile Has Failed

Mike Hadlow: Coconut Headphones: Why Agile Has Failed.

My first real contact with the ideas of agile software development came from reading Bob Martin’s book ‘Agile Software Development’.

the majority of the book is about software engineering, not management practices.

Somehow, over the decade or so since the original agile manifesto, agile has come to mean ‘management agile’.

James Shore has an excellent post, Cargo Cult Agile

Current non-technical agile practitioners still don’t understand where the airplanes come from.

The core problem is that non-technical managers of software projects will always fail, or at best be counter productive, whatever the methodology. Developing software is a deeply technical endeavour.

Because creating good software is so much about technical decisions and so little about management process, I believe that there is very little place for non-technical managers in any software development organisation. If your role is simply asking for estimates and enforcing the agile rituals: stand-ups, fortnightly sprints, retrospectives; then you are an impediment rather than an asset to delivery

I don’t have an answer, or an alternative methodology to offer you, but here are some things that any software development organisation must address:

Because the technical and motivational aspects of software development are so key, I’m very intrigued by the zero-management approaches of organisations such as Valve and GitHub. ((2012-12-08) Bowkett Management Gamification Github Valve Skyrim)