Reflecting on The Decline of Agile
Recently James Shore wrote an article called The Decline and Fall of Agile where he talked about how Agile, and Scrum in particular, is failing many companies. The main reason I started writing this series of articles on our team’s experiences was to help myself examine why we’d had such a hard time with Scrum in various ways. In this part of My First Agile Project I’m going to go through Mr. Shore’s article and compare it to our experiences.
In the article, Mr. Shore focuses mostly on the engineering aspects of Scrum, or lack thereof. In our experience, Scrum’s lack of proscriptive engineering processes is hardly the biggest problem. It could be that we haven’t had enough time to run into the walls of difficult-to-manage code that he’s seen but thanks to some of the other problems we’ve had with shifting requirements and the like, we’ve all revisited chunks of our code during the project and we aren’t slowing down because of it. Read on for more on Mr. Shore’s essay and how I see it through the lens of our project. It may be that Agile is declining, but if so it isn’t for the reasons he’s seen.