Saying Goodbye to Agile (lewiscampbell.tech)

reading royce made it apparent the agile movement was, in part, a response to a strawman

i have no doubt that places were practicing waterfall in the large. people running businesses, both vendor and client, want 'predictable' estimates up front, with a single timeframe, and single quote

but i suspect internally projects followed an iterative process, where designs were refined repeatedly and testing happened early. because you had to

unfortunately, those projects were still judged by a waterfall yardstick, with inflating timescales and bills, giving something for agile to attack

and on first blush, agile, the manifesto, sounds reasonable enough

but, after 30-40 years of practice to reflect upon, agile:

- has some good parts that were already well documented, i.e royce and brooks

- some radical parts of dubious general applicability and benefit

- just enough ambiguity that we have since been arguing what true agile really is

and this is what prevents it from ever really working or being the basis to solidify an engineering field around

it helped us get some of the way there but it won't help us get further and it's time to let it die