The End of Agile as We Know It

It's been 20 years or so, but the end is in sight. We have successfully placed the adjective 'agile' in front of about every important noun in our software development / IT world: agile design, agile testing, agile management, agile database, agile architecture, agile user-interaction.... Agile has won the war. "What is next?" is the question I've been asked again and again. What is the future of software engineering? The next best thing? Is it DevOps, cloud-something, micro-services, AI? The adjective agile has lost some of its weight and novelty, only a few laggards are still asking "what is it?" It is time to reflect on the fundamental aspects of agility: what does it really means, what are the fundamental principles behind it, that made its successes. The agile movement has had some tremendous impact in the way we work, putting the human being and human interaction more central in these processes, by using extensively iterations, direct interactions, and feedback loops. But at the same time, some aspects of agile have become dogmatic, fossilized, and the agile movement has not been always very agile in its application to itself. These dogmatic aspects have slowed the expansion of its own principles to some of the more complex or much larger software development endeavours. Now, the increasing need for speed, the availability of opensource software repositories, the shifts in technology, such as the cloud, the emergence of software ecosystems are creating new needs in terms of process and project management, that can exploit the fundamental principles of agile, beyond the dogma of this or that method, this or that practice. As the amount of software in use is growing and will outgrow the capacity of our industry to maintain and evolve it, the industry faces a massive amount of technical debt, which we do not know well how to mitigate or repay. Agile has been very valuable, but once its lessons are fully integrated in the way we work we have to look beyond and stop repeating it like a mantra. Agile is dead. Long live agility.