An approach to teaching Agile 20 years after the Agile Manifesto

Joep Schuurkes — Mon, 26 Apr 2021 14:54:34 GMT

For a few weeks I've been thinking about how I would teach Agile¹ in 2021, 20 years after the Agile Manifesto was published. After sharing my thoughts at CitCon Europe 2021 Virtual and having an interesting conversation about the state of Agile and how to teach it, I figured it's time to write a blog post about it.

Why I started thinking about this

As Allan Kelly stated in a 2018 blog post:

"Agile won the war but lost the peace."

Everyone is doing Agile, even though very few people are living the dream promised by Agile. This makes it very difficult to use "Agile" as a label, as a name for something. When someone says "Agile", are they referring to what you're already doing or to something they think you should be doing?

Additionally, the Agile Manifesto was written in 2001, based on what its authors were doing in the 1990s in response to the common ways of doing software development of that time. And since the Manifesto we've seen the introduction of Lean, of DevOps, and of CI/CD. So the amount of history that comes with Agile is large and it raises the question how much (if any) we should teach - especially since a lot of it is folklore instead of history². Doing Agile's history justice would probably cost more time than makes sense if your goal is to teach people how to develop software in an Agile way³. And a lot of that history was a relatively long time ago, which is why I titled my CitCon session "Teaching Agile to people younger than the Manifesto".

Joep Schuurkes (Posts about lean)

An approach to teaching Agile 20 years after the Agile Manifesto

Why I started thinking about this