Agile Development Going Downhill?

James Shore (author of the fantastic book: The Art Of Agile Development) wrote a very interesting post on his blog: The Decline And Fall Of Agile. You should definitely read it.

I'm afraid i agree with James. Over the last few years i've heard a lot of people saying they were doing Agile development, where in reality they hardly were. To quote James:

But guess which part people adopt? That's right--Sprints and Scrums. Rapid cycles, but none of the good stuff that makes rapid cycles sustainable.

And this is unfortunately very true. A lot of teams are working in short iterations now, and a lot of teams are doing daily meetings, or scrums, or stand-up meetings. But how many of them are actually committed to the technical practices and principles that enable successful Agile development? Honestly, i've never seen one.

I'm a big fan of true Agile development but even in my current job, my last 2 teams haven't done it 'completely right' either. Our results are pretty good though, but i think we can still do much better. I gradually try to introduce more of the principles and practices but it does take some time. But all of these misconceptions about Agile Development that so many people (developers, project managers, management in general) have aren't really helping. At my current job, those misconceptions are pretty small and they don't really have a bad influence. In previous situations at clients, i did notice how those misconceptions led to tremendously ineffective situations. Which is pretty sad actually, because sooner or later managers will probably become skeptical of Agile Methodologies. If that leads to people abandoning some of the technical practices and principles, it would be a pretty big loss to the 'cause'.

All in all more reasons to read James' excellent book i think. If i could legally get away with forcing people to read that book, i would