Saying goodbye to Agile

I've come to dread any formalization of Agile. Agile development is fine. I've built a 40+ engineering team with it. I can vouch for its effectiveness when applied to small, excellent teams.

For reference, here's all the Agile you need, it's 4 sentences:

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools

Working software over comprehensive documentation

Customer collaboration over contract negotiation

Responding to change over following a plan

The real problem is that capital-A Agile is not agile at all, but exactly the opposite: A fat process that enforces following a plan (regular, rigid meeting structure), creating comprehensive documentation (user stories, specs, mocks, task board) and contract negotiation (estimation meetings, planning poker). It's a bastardization of the original idea, born by process first people who tried to copy the methods of successful teams without understanding them.

Isn’t Communism the original here? It’s often claimed that all historic attempts to establish Communism don’t work cause it wasn’t done in the right way.

In all seriousness, this pattern is probably hard to avoid in any reasonably complex entity/environment. If any such situation would be solved in a global solution (aka silver bullet), it would be used by everyone. As this seems not possible, any framework like Agile, Communism, … can only be a guidance to be applied locally, and broken internally and by external factors in many ways

That’s Scrum you are thinking of. Not agile.

Strategic Bombing - the idea wars can be won from the air alone - is the absolute worst of these. It's a religion that might well someday kill us all, or a great many of us. In the quest to dot it "enough" . . .

On a lighter note . .

The world of overly-complex CCS (component content systems) like DITA has made this "Agile flavor of treadmill[1]" into the entire business, greased with liberal squirts of FOMO and "Industry Standards".

It rhymes with capital A Agile in many ways, although in the case of DITA specifically I'd posit that the underlying assumption of the spec is a vast category error: that natural language has formal types.

[1] i.e., "you aren't doing it properly" . . . and with every change in technology the DITA / XML priesthood claimed to hold the keys to unlock it. SEO? Information Typing. Web Content? XML/XAL pipelines. Big Data? Content granularity. LLMs? Information typing and schema will "help" llms and not just be an unholy clog in the guts of vector embedding operations. And yet, the years go by, and all of it has worked and continues to work fine without switching the world to DITA (and a writing universe of strict validation based on speculative assumptions).

The point is the agent writes the specs and the human reviews and revises or asks for another rewrite that takes 90 seconds or less. So specs are both cheaper and better than anything I've seen before. They still get a lot wrong and it is hard to review them very carefully, but its easier than reviewing code to suss out design intent.