Has Agile Died? ☠
Lately, I’ve seen quite a bit of rejection towards agile methodologies from significant academic sources, even reading claims that they have died or are a scam. I firmly believe there’s a considerable misconception regarding the fundamental utility of Scrum and why we decide to use Agile or Waterfall. Choosing to use Agile isn’t about “optimizing”! It’s a way of working that involves:
- Accelerating the delivery of value.
- Minimizing risks, especially the risk of building something that doesn’t meet a real need.
After all, if what you want to develop (the scope) is perfectly defined, then Waterfall is the key methodology. Clearly, there might be no point in wasting time on alignment or validation meetings: the goal is to have all of this <Package> by this date, so why spend (use) time on tasks that delay this delivery?
On the contrary, if you need to control every step you take because uncertainty is high, then you should adopt an Agile framework where you verify each delivery to try to mitigate as much risk as possible. Who wants to build a solution that is not valuable to their client? Moreover, accelerating the delivery of value implies that, if properly prioritized, you will always deliver the most relevant features and, in case something is out of scope, it should be less important than what has already been developed.
In the end, it’s all about a tradeoff, and the effort is in finding the best balance for each case.
