What If Agile Never Happened
Alternate realities are a staple of many science fiction series. Exploring what our world might be like if this or that had or hadn’t happened can help shed light on the significance of a particular event.
The Agile approach to software development, although neither conceived nor born at Snowbird in 2001, coalesced and started to gain traction from around then.
What if the Snowbird gathering had never happened? What if the seeds which led to Snowbird had not been planted, or had fallen on barren ground?
Here’s a few hypotheses, or scenarios, to consider:
The Business Hypothesis
Maybe, in the absence of developers trying to wrangle some effectiveness into the work they were obliged to do, business folks might have got a grip. Unlikely, I grant you. But absent some existing movement to suborn or seize upon, maybe the pain of software and product development might have persuaded the “business side” to find better ways of creating and delivering products.
The Together Hypothesis
Maybe everyone involved in software and product development might have got together and pursued the finding of a joint solution. Also unlikely, I guess.
The More Of The Same Hypothesis
Another possibility is that nothing much would have changed. Developers would have continued, more or less frustrated, in prevailing waterfall or ad-hoc projects and ways of working. Outcomes would have continued to be poor for all concerned. Some may say that this is really what did happen, only the names have been changed.
The Extrapolation Of Prevailing Trends Hypothesis
Maybe trends prevailing circa Y2K would have continued to evolve. Organisations seeking to improve might have embrace and evolved things like project management, CMMI, and so on. I can’t see this as effecting significant change or improvement, but maybe things might have improved slowly, in the order of a percentage point or two annually.
The Radical Hypothesis
Finally – in the list of alternate realities I’m presenting here – we might have seen a (more) radical alternative to Agile arise. Without convenient, ready-made, and packaged “Agile solutions” to adopt, maybe folks who cared might have studied their problems for themselves. Maybe this study might have found the root conditions. Maybe it might have surfaced more radical, more fundamental solutions. Solutions explicitly directed at communities of collaborative knowledge work, at the core role of collective mindsets, people and relationships, and at a system (business) wide approach to both adoption of new approaches and the ongoing use of those approaches.
What do you imagine might have happened if Agile had never been?
– Bob
