The Agile Uprising

We were discussing (on a mailing list) the Egyptian uprising and the interest in watching to see who/what stepped in to fill the vacuum of an apparent “leaderless” bit of unrest. Will there be freedom and democracy? Or yet another autocracy? I think there are some parallels to our software world.

Sometimes I wonder if some folks just — subconsciously maybe? — like to be told what to do. After all, it is easier to follow a prescriptive process that you are told will result in the desired goal, than being asked to achieve a goal on your own.

In 2001, the “Agile Manifesto” asked folks to achieve a goal, largely on their own. While there are plenty of agile practices that one can adopt as individuals and teams, there was no glaring “Rational Unified Process CD” with all the process, roles and diagrams that you could ever want to hide behind. There was no venerated “Waterfall Process” that allowed entire silos of functional teams to work on their own with little linkage to being effective at ultimately meeting the goal (until it is too late). There was no marketing-driven organization crying out for the need to be more agile. Hence, it has taken nearly a decade for Agile to become mainstream.

In 2001, Agile was just kind of thrown out there, fanning the flames of freedom for millions of software developers. For a long time, there was no real concerted effort to coalesce a new form of software development and spread it among the unwashed masses.

There didn’t need to be, or so I thought. Agile urges each individual to (using a US football metaphor) “throw the BS flag” whenever there is a need. Agile asks each individual and team to be craftsmen and do their best to achieve the client’s goal.

Agile throws off the shackles of command-and-control and bureaucratic absurdity. Agile works best from the bottom up, being “pulled” in the proper direction as we attempt to satisfy the needs of the clients — not force dictates down their throat. Agile expects and demands the best from individuals.

However, with great freedom comes great responsibility. Being agile is simple, but not easy.

I suppose some dominant command-and-control, bureaucracies were threatened by Agile uprisings, and kept the practices suppressed, driving some teams “underground.”

In the past few years, however, our community has seen a major embracing of Scrum by small and big companies alike. Maybe Scrum looks enough like routine Project Management that bureaucracies can be easily led to buy into this “agile” stuff.

So, maybe the Scrum Alliance did step in to fill that leadership vacuum after all?

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