Are you an IT consultant or contractor? Agile Software Development work is dead. If you practice that, you are a doorstop. If you manage that way, you are a boat-anchor. The wave has ended, it is over, and if you went for the head-fake and bought certifications, you wasted some money. Soon recruiters will be putting your resume in the circular storage container. I have been warning you for some time, and the day is here. Hah, you should have listened. Move along.

[For the less intuitive, please note that these overstatements are intentionally somewhat facetious. Some detail oriented readers completely missed the point of the sarcasm here. Agile is not a hamster and cannot die dead, splat, all at once. Death is an inevitable process, and everything, everywhere will continue to die. No exceptions. Alternatively not being a life form, it was never alive and could not die, so what does dead mean? Use of the word "dead" can clearly be questioned, and it is examined in 2 ways in this post, relative to the market for services. Also see Agile is Dead 2. ]

In truth, it will probably take a while. Many big things keep moving after death, like giant zombie worms. Big corporations, government agency business processes and obsolete technologies can be that way. Some small bits may live on forever, like the anti-hero's hand or eye in a horror film.

All these hyped trends have a lifespan. Management fads especially have a lifespan. In the modern environment these waves are closer together, and closer, and closer. The end of the curve can mean unpopularity, few sales, reduced margins i.e "death". No more big money to be made, margins and fees reduced- this will happen when the market penetration is very high, at maximum, and then begins to fall. There will be too many people in the market, and this causes the salaries and fees to drop. This is opposed to the geek meaning, more akin to "brain death", implying the thing has no more technical merit. [Note: I ultimately had to spell this out. So much for sarcastic subtlety.]

I have done a good bit of consulting/contracting. So the job of the consultant is to grab a wave and make money while he can, then grab another. (The best may resist the waves and hype, the worst are unaware of them.) He may not serve customer interests much, but he can eat. At the beginning of some waves you will find engineering and technical rigor and proof, but at the end more concern for consultant fees, revenue and profit with some normal concerns regarding the extension of marketing and sales.

These waves can be seen as the superimposition of Gartner Hype Cycle (tm) curves for multiple technologies. Did you think it would last forever? Nothing lasts forever, but things based on solid engineering last longer. Guess where that puts Agile Software Development? In the trash. Manifesto indeed, I hope it felt good.

Anyway there is a cycle, so it will eventually die in a marketing sense- replaced by the next thing. (It is not the total sales to date that are important in the services cycle, but their first derivative. The rate of adoption is, at first, slow and then quickens. As saturation occurs the rate of adoption slows again. The cycle is not symmetric. But in the late cycle decrease may occur quickly, and rate of decrease may be high. Jobs and sales may decrease quickly.)

Who Said?

Who said Agile is dead? The founders of Agile and its practitioners said it, not me. Don't go thinking I made this up. (I claim nothing myself regarding its current death, I just report the claims of many developers. It's dead with or without me or my post. As for my interpretation of "dead", see above. This section explains a second meaning of "dead".)

The moral of this part of the story is that if you want to use a specific brand/term (Agile) in a specific commercial domain (software development) with a specific meaning (manifesto), then get a trademark from USPTO. Otherwise your naive efforts will be co-opted, and your control/meaning will soon be lost as money is involved.

The meaning (of the brand name "Agile") was lost, the technical merit was diluted, and those looking for technical excellence abandoned the effort, and if not for the efforts of "true believers" it might be history already.

Inevitable

The geeky death of the brand-name occurred some time ago, in which the captains abandoned ship on the name Agile, though few noticed. I thought its demise was inevitable myself. It had been marketed as a panacea, as all things to all people. Yes, I participated some early on, then stepped back from the media event boondoggle. Why specifically?

Others were skeptical too, of course. Here is a great article by David Longstreet expressing a range well thought out of misgivings. Yet Agile has become the most popular software project management paradigm, certainly exceeding my expectations. People commonly fix some of these issues above, ignore the manifesto, and call it Agile anyway (AINO). Market penetration is high, real applicability is limited, problems have not been solved, the original supporters have left, the name is tarnished, implementations are highly modified away from original goals.

Some think Agile has conquered the world permanently. With so many unaddressed shortfalls, there is no reason to believe this approach will last forever. To continue selling, marketing money will be shifted to supporting a new product name and highlighting the problems of the old product. Agile will be obsolete at some upcoming date. This is how the market for such methodologies and services works. Sales must occur and people must eat.

[Whatever the next wave is, there is certainly are a mass of deficiencies to highlight in the Agile wave. Surely they will be exploited? The point of this section is less that I am calling the baby ugly to anger the fanatic parents- but rather that others are probably coming to do so. They have plenty of ammo.]

The moral of this part of the story is that if you produce some compact politicised ideology (manifesto) consisting of principles and rules there will be unintended consequences. Success creates a religion or cult, and defeat is being ignored. No such doctrine is perfect. Thinking you will change the world with a manifesto is naive, and if you succeed you may not have improved the world.

What Can be Saved

I am certain parts can be saved. I participated in a large project about 1994 with small teams, daily standups (we sat down) for problems and weekly progress checks. It worked great, and I was a big fan. I also participated in what was essentially scrum development with a genius team in 2005- without a manifesto or various nonsense. In both cases the architect knew what the thing would do before effort began, and you could identify ROI. So iteration and teams will be saved, but they preceded the Agile brand anyway. Surely there is more that works fine and can be saved if you take out the insane bits of cult logic.

User stories for example are fine, if you use them to produce real requirements. Poor requirements and poor testing have driven the software quality problems related to Agile. I do not here refer to very low-level testing which might be automated, but the rest of it.

The name of Count Agile may live forever, as an ideal, both undead and brain-dead. I recently heard I could program in FORTRAN- oops- Fortran again for 6 figures. Yet the specific term "Agile" as a brand probably has to go- Dave Thomas was right.

However the Agile Manifesto should be replaced with reputable research findings and serious management. This "manifesto" eschewed all management and engineering rigor in favor of laziness. Some of it should probably also be burned, buried and then a very big rock placed on top. Then a warning to future generations should be carved in the rock. 'Something like "Naive oversimplified management ideology does not sell services forever, especially when promoted by non-managers. BOHICA!"

What's Next

So next comes the DevOps wave. It is the "heir apparent". If you buy software development services at a medium or large scale then someone will be in your office selling you DevOps this year. (When they do, they will say it is better than mere Agile. You have to buy it.) There is still a chance to fix this one.

There are also various modified forms of Agile resulting from practical experience and improvement. Maybe someone will make a real marketing effort with one of those.

The moral of this part of the story is that if you started adopting Agile now, you would be a very late adopter. Adopting any such sweeping change has a high startup cost. You may be better off skipping a wave and moving directly to whatever comes next.

Recommendation

Some people asked me for recommendations. This is really about the market cycle, but I will try to say something useful. So in the meantime, if you are currently using AINO (like my government colleagues) you are at the state of the art, and doing the right thing. Be prepared to adjust DevOps the very same way, accommodating governance and controls. Consider relaxing mandatory methodology rules to allow the PM to customize for the situation at hand. Consider that Agile may not be best for large, complex projects. If they force you to use Agile, agree and adapt whatever you need to to make it work- regardless of purists. Read this.

However if you ask me what direction we should be going in, I do have an opinion. While in manufacturing approaches like Lean and Six-Sigma are meant to improve quality, Agile and DevOps are meant to increase volume. But the quality of our software is too low, and the requirement has increased. The number of defects, including vulnerabilities is far too high. In enterprise software, the quality of software measured as "fit for purpose" has also become too low, decreasing operational improvements. If I were king, I would prefer to see a methodology using the (ISC)2 recommended practices in the SDLC, and the emerging OWASP practices, with more certifications like the CSSLP. I would like to see us turn away from greater volumes of sloppy software before it destroys civilization.

Outlook

The Agile hype-wave is over. There were serious, fundamental problems. I really doubt anyone will fix those issues in DevOps. Enterprise customers will have to create hybrid approaches, just like Agile. Our current culture in software technology is not about real improvements. We currently prefer comfy culture over strategy and effectiveness.

If you really want to fix it, I'll be right here to talk about that. In the meantime you might look up systems engineering, CMMI, corporate controls, security testing, operational evaluation and start thinking how that can be bolted on to DevOps. Or you can work in a product oriented software development company and stay away from enterprise software implementation. That oversimplified crap may work inside a software development company, but not in an enterprise customer environment. (Toby Wootton recently expressed it well, with a PM spin.) Big enterprises have switched to AINO (Agile In Name Only).

In the meantime when you say "Agile Software Development" everyone will know you are referring to just another methodology, one that failed to produce the promised results, one that was widely implemented inadequately, one no better than Waterfall or Spiral overall, one with certain relative strengths and even more weaknesses. 'No more magic dust. Several of the founders of Agile Software Development and many other influential developers have pronounced it dead. Only consultants and managers with a vested interest in the brand-name "Agile" still want it alive.

Summary

Here is the summary of what I said:

(1) Agile became a brand-name, with marketing hype. It therefore became subject to the rules of all such hyped products. First there is great acceptance, then a crash. A period of long term acceptance may occur, or not, based on real results. However the days of fanaticism and huge hype will be over forever. This is "death" in a marketing sense.

(2) As this happened, the deep programming thinkers who created and adopted the methodology became disillusioned as none of the vision was being implemented. The name Agile was co-opted. Substitutions and changes did not accomplish the goals of the proposal. It was abandoned by those deep thinkers. The core technical merit was lost. This was "death" in a the geek sense.

(3) Those who remained sold Agile in a highly modified sense, keeping the name but little of the original vision. This pragmatic view was driven by sales and marketing, as the name still had time left in the cycle to be exploited. Customers adopted Agile with massive changes to fit in with real enterprise governance and corporate controls, for example. See my post on AINO.

This last is the nature of current adoption, but the hype wave has ended or is ending. This is a post about hyped technologies and methodologies, marketing, and the end-game of a brand-name abandoned by its originators. It is about the cynical nature of what remains. It is about the old brand being currently superseded by the new brand, with fundamental problems unaddressed.

Read the follow-on post, "Agile Is Dead 2".

Then read Real Agility.

And also

"The Enterprise Quality Gap".

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(Note: Just to be clear, software development has little to do with the common daily duties of an enterprise level architect. (EA does often keep the list of organizational standards. Agile could be among those. There is some possible relevance.) But, as some of you know, I was long ago a PM for integration projects, a solution architect, and did some of my own prototyping, wrote some drivers, did some assembler for a couple years. Hence my interest in this topic. I do not think of this as one of my many EA posts. No more flames claiming I think dev is EA. Thanks.)

(Note: This was partly meant as a public service to my colleagues who are still seeking the mystical one, wherein the screen and keyboard disappear and only your mind and the code remain. You published truth and the marketing machine ignored it. I took my shot. I did not expect all the management consultants still pushing Agile (to make money) to launch desperate attacks and claim it has an endless bright future. This is not why I selected the image, it was just not expected to be such an incendiary topic. Really. I just randomly picked that image. No?)

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This post began as a side effect of conducting my yearly retraining. My certifications require me to obtain some new training every year. Each year I pick the training topics, within various constraints of the certifying agencies, based on what will produce some ROI (Return on Investment). Training is expensive.

This year I looked at some sort of Agile training, and examined if that would produce results on government proposals, projected against available work here in DC in 2016-17. The answer I found was that the Agile market and hype wave was ending as I had predicted earlier. I rejected Agile as a training topic. I wrote a post for others to inform and entertain my peers, training aside. This could be a dry subject.

The result was unexpected. At this time the post has 270K views. Top LI posts of all time have 10x that, but 270K is still huge. This occurred because LI chose to make it a featured post in the software development category. My usual posts in Enterprise Architecture are never used there.

I have received 600 additional followers, a few dozen connections. The post has been shared about 1,800 times, often a sign of a strong "like". It has about 3,000 likes, running about the usual range of 1% for large volume posts I have examined

It has now 578 comments, and has been controversial. Many took the post as an indictment of Agile in general, and I did list some flaws. The purpose of listing the flaws was to show it was not a panacea. With the other evidence provided, the point was that nothing lasts forever and this fad is ending. Many have argued "Agile is good!" Fine, whatever, if it pays the bills. Yet it is far from perfect. Frankly I would prefer to debate the future and not the past.

Followers of Agile are often like cult members. I blocked nearly 50 people because of this one post, all of whom wanted to argue that "Agile is great", often adding that I am an idiot. This was not the purpose of the post and many had not even read the post. I find that rude. They did not care to discuss the market cycle. They seemed to just want to argue. Life is too short.

I am removing "go viral" from my bucket list. I have a follow-on post, Agile is Dead 2, showing evidence of the current market phase, without any humor in it.

January, 2017: I have disabled comments on this old post. It had reached 654 comments at 331,000 views. To start a discussion, please see one of my newer posts.