June 13, 2024

Are Scrum & Agile Dead? - Mike Cohn

6 minutes

I’ve always said I wanted Scrum and agile to go away.
Is that happening? I don’t think a week passes without some article about their deaths appearing in my browser or email.
Within a few years of the Agile Manifesto being written, I began to say I wanted agile to go away. I didn’t mean I wanted us to stop using them. Rather, I want them to win.
I want agile to become so much the accepted approach to product development, or to teamwork in general, that we could stop talking about it.
Instead of saying “agile software development,” for example, I could just say “software development” and the assumption would be that, of course, that meant agile software development.
To some extent, we’re there.
Changes Accelerated by Agile
When Scrum emerged as the original agile framework in the mid-1990s, cross-functional teams were not common. They are now.
Software development back then was done in phases—typically an analysis phase followed by design, coding, and testing phases.
Heavy duty, pixel-perfect prototypes were common back then due to the high cost of iterating over a design. While prototypes are still used today, multiple quick prototypes are now common to help product owners and managers choose between options.
Before the advent of agile, organizations thought they could add quality to a product by testing quality in at the end. Agile has helped us see that isn’t true.
Barry Boehm’s spiral model (1986) and Tom Gilb’s evolutionary delivery (1988) had started a shift to iterative, incremental development. But that shift accelerated dramatically after the Manifesto in 2001.
(Did you know I named Mountain Goat Software after a sentence in Tom Gilb’s book?)
What I Hear about Agile Today
Recent articles and podcasts saying agile is dead are not saying we need to reverse the improvements agile initiated or accelerated.
I haven’t read anything advocating a return to waterfall development or, more accurately, the ad hoc development practices that were more common before agile.
Instead, the “agile is dead” articles more closely mimic my long-held view that we can eventually stop talking about agile teams, agile development, agile frameworks and more. They’ll just become teams, development, and frameworks.
So are agile and Scrum dead?
I don’t think so.
I think there’s still plenty of work ahead. It’s why we’re focusing more attention toward whole-team training.
Some of the agile and Scrum fatigue I sense today is analogous to what happens in the music industry. Fans who love an artist’s first few albums often sour on that artist when they’re discovered by the masses. The artist is no longer the hip, new thing and many early fans move on because of that.
I will be happy when agile wins, when we can drop it as an adjective in front of so many terms. Until then I will remain dedicated to helping teams succeed with agile,