Shut Up About Agile

I am sick and tired of hearing people talk about Agile. Seriously. I'm over it. One of the few positives of social media is that it allows us to have a broad, international discussion about a variety of topics. One of the many downsides of social media is that once a topic becomes popular, it will be squeezed completely dry, and then squeezed a little bit more, in case there was any juice left. Then a few months later, the rotting carcass will be wheeled back out in case there are still more takers.

Everywhere I go these days, every YouTube channel, every blog post, it's all talking about how AGILE SUCKS ACTUALLY, or, more annoyingly, how AGILE IS ACTUALLY GOOD BUT YOU'RE ALL DOING IT WRONG. Followed by a long, rambly diatribe that can be summarized as follows:

I worked for a company and they did <thing I didn't like>. That's not real Agile. REAL Agile is this really vague concept that I can't quite explain, but trust me, I understand it. That's why I'm going to regurgitate a bunch of buzzwords like 'iteration' and 'collaboration', and conveniently forget to provide any real-world examples.

- Anyone who talks about Agile, every time

I'm not going to get into the weeds of what I think Agile is. I'm here to cut through noise, not add to it. What I think Agile is, is a waste of time. Agile has become a completely useless word in the software world. Agile has a lot of vague definitions, and as soon as you try to discuss specifics, you get into fights. Because my Agile might have literally nothing in common with your Agile apart from a philosophy that neither of us have the communication skills to discuss.

Really, Agile carries two meanings: First, Agile is everything that is good and right in software. It's everything that I like in my dev process, that makes me feel productive. Second, Agile is everything that is bad and evil in software. It's everything I don't like in my dev process, that makes me feel unproductive. Agile isn't the only word with two complete opposite definitions: The word "chuffed" is similar. Except that "chuffed" is a funny haha quirk of the English language and "Agile" is a discourse machine that's wasted around 3,000 years of otherwise productive dev time.

If you're reading this and thinking "Hey, Agile isn't just 'whatever I like', Agile is actually-" Shut up. Shut the fuck up. You are part of the problem. Stop talking about Agile.

Agile serves a single purpose in conversations today. It's a rhetorical tool you can use to start unwinnable arguments. If you're ever losing an argument, you can always turn it into an argument about what Agile means. Then you can immediately launch into a Redditor monologue about how nobody understands what REAL Agile is like, which will of course make you appear handsome, likeable, and intelligent all at once. Just make sure to steer the conversation away from uncomfortable questions like "Have you ever been on a team that you would describe as Agile, and was it good". I'm sure your answer won't be some variation of "Agile, like autism, is a spectrum that I am on". Please, keep lecturing people on what Agile "really" means. I'm sure everyone else is dying to hear your totally original take.

The problem I'm trying to point out here is that Agile has become a buzzword. And I don't mean "it's a buzzword when management says it, but when I say it, it's meaningful". It's a buzzword when you use it too. So stop using it. This might come as a surprise to many of you, but many words exist that are actually better than "Agile" for describing your process. You can use words like "efficient", "iterative", "bureaucratic", or "high-trust", and what's even better, people will actually know what you mean!

One of the major proponents of Agile is Uncle Bob, everyone's favorite guy. He's done incalculable damage to the software industry in the past three decades, but don't worry. He's got a take on Agile too. Can you guess what it is? That's right! His take is that Agile is a good idea and you're all doing it wrong. Of course, if you ever press him for specifics, he just dodges and weaves and tells you stories of the good old days so he never has to say he's wrong about anything ever. These tactics are common among people who speak at length about topics they don't understand. I'm convinced that there is no person on this planet who actually understands Agile. Just millions of developers and managers who think they do because they watched a YouTube video.

If your management is good, your work environment will be good. If management is bad, your work environment will be bad. Agile has nothing to do with this. In conclusion, "Agile" is a word that:

• Describes nothing that actually exists
• Has no specific, articulable, widely agreed-upon meaning
• Leads people to use objective language when describing subjective things (a recipe for starting arguments)
• Focuses the conversation on process and semantics at the expense of what actually matters (the people you work with).

Stop talking about Agile.