If you’re in the business of supplying IT services, especially software and product development, to your clients, you may be getting uneasy (again). Agile software development, and its close cousin, DevOps, are the latest in a long line of approaches promising to solve the “software crisis”. And like the many approaches that have gone before, their faults are beginning to show, and the chickens are coming home to roost.

As they say:

“…you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.”

I don’t doubt that many solutions providers and consultancies have the best interests of both their clients and their own staff at heart, and are not just focused on their revenues. And just like their antecedents, Agile and DevOps did look promising. But just as with those antecedents, time has shown the core ideas wanting. Or, more accurately, insufficient in the majority of cases.

Why Early Adopters Have Good News

Whatever the approach, its early adopters generally have good stories to tell, about good outcomes. And why not? These folks had the enthusiasm, the curiosity, the drive, and the grasp of the principles to make the approach work. Later adopters, absent some or all of these advantages, have struggled to see useful benefits. No matter what the approach.

That Nose

Truly, the cold wet nose of reality has been sniffing out the latent flaws implicit in Agile and DevOps from the outset.

Smarter Now

I’d like to hope that we’re collectively smarter now. That having seen so many promising approaches come and go, we might be on the verge of seeing beyond the superficial attractions of each new approach. That we may be, finally, developing the deeper lore that will show us why all our approaches to date have sooner or later failed us. I’d like to hope that, But in general, I see precious little evidence of it happening.

“A new type of thinking is essential if mankind is to survive and move toward higher levels.”
~ Albert Einstein

– Bob