In this week’s episode of our podcast, What the Dev?, we conversed with David Ross from Miro concerning prevalent misconceptions about Agile methodology and its evolution since its inception.

Here is a summarized version of our discussion:

From your experience, how has the perception of Agile shifted over the years?

I have nearly two decades of experience in software development, witnessing the transformation in the understanding of Agile from its early days to now. Initially, it involved strict adherence to specific frameworks such as Scrum or Kanban. The belief was that the more precisely one followed these frameworks, the more genuinely ‘Agile’ they were considered.

And what we forgot in all of that was, of course, that the Agile values and principles don’t prescribe any particular framework or approach. You’re supposed to put people and interactions over tools and processes. Well, if you are enforcing processes and you’re asking people to interact via tools, that kind of defeats a lot of the very fundamental sort of values of Agile right from the get go.

We also have problems, in that a lot of people came into the industry, and maybe people who were not sufficiently trained or had enough experience in real, good Agile practices, and there was just a lot of bad, bad Agile out there. You know, people who got a two-day certificate stamped and said, hey, I’m going to come in and now enforce Scrum processes on this team and coach them to higher levels of agility, and that’s not a recipe for success.

This has been true of DevOps, value stream management, you name it, these are just vague, non-prescriptive processes to follow. But nobody says you have to be doing X, Y and Z to be Agile, or be doing full DevOps, or be doing value stream management. It’s kind of like, well, we’re just going to leave it up to you, adopt what you want, throw out what you don’t want, we don’t mean to be prescriptive. But, I think that has added to so much confusion in these markets over the years. So where we’re at now, and you’re talking about evolving into this modern era, what’s impacting it? Is it simply cloud-native computing? Is it AI? Is it all of the above?

I feel like Agile reached this sort of peak, where people were finding that they weren’t really getting the value that had been promised as a part of an Agile transformation. They weren’t seeing the value for their customers, they weren’t seeing their value for their teams. And, you know, the house of cards started to fall apart a little bit. And let’s be honest as well, one of the things about Agile was you had to have co-located teams, so that’s one sacred cow that got sacrificed during Covid, because co-located teams just wasn’t a possibility, and we’re not in that world anymore.

Agile was originally created to address specific challenges in software development, primarily concerning timely delivery and value realization. Over time, however, Agile methodologies have evolved and expanded beyond software development, recognizing that the approach needs modification and cannot be uniformly applied across different contexts. This realization has necessitated a more adaptive and pragmatic application instead of adhering strictly to initial prescriptions.

Currently, we are witnessing a phase where Agile is being rethought and redefined. Many are moving away from rigid frameworks and developing tailored approaches that fit their unique needs. Even though these approaches may use different terminologies, they embody Agile principles but may not be immediately recognizable to professionals from a decade ago.

The introduction of cloud-native computing brought further complexity, adding layers like APIs, Kubernetes, and containers, altering how Agile is practiced. How have these changes influenced Agile methodologies, and what adaptations have been necessary?

In response to these complexities, there’s a shift away from stringent frameworks towards greater flexibility in adapting processes. It’s becoming clear that the ability to adapt, rather than strictly follow a set framework, should have been the approach from the beginning. This evolution includes moving away from defined roles typical in traditional frameworks, signaling a broader transformation in the practice of Agile.

Also, working with tool sets that are less rigid and more flexible. So if you are trying to run everything within a very defined set of tools, and those tools define your workflow, that’s very constrictive, I feel like for a lot of companies and a lot of teams, and they’re trying to find a better way to organize themselves and to support their ways of working using more flexible tool sets.

How is AI impacting Agile development?

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