Agile practices endure and continue to adapt

Agile is a personal journey

Agile practices, tools, frameworks, nomenclature and mindsets have evolved significantly over the last 20 years. While you can read the official history of the Agile Manifesto and review an Agile practice timeline, learning and applying Agile is highly personal. How serial entrepreneurs learn and implement Agile practices is very different from how enterprise Agile coaches lead transformation in large organizations, or how delivery managers at large systems integrators adjust to different Agile practices across multiple customers.

In other words, there are multiple ways to apply Agile -- even within its most common methodologies like Scrum and Kanban. There are many ways to scale Agile to multiple teams, including SAFe, LeSS and StarCIO; dozens of tools to manage Agile backlogs; essential choices on how to integrate Agile with the software development lifecycle (SDLC); vital decisions on becoming test-driven and automating testing; and fundamental practices to rationalize with Agile, including DevOps and data science.

Some aspects of Agile's history speak to the types of choices Agile leaders face when deciding what practices to adopt, when to introduce them and how best to implement in their organizations.

• Scrum's roots trace back to the years from 1993 to 1995 when Jeff Southerland and Ken Schwaber introduced it, while Kanban traces back to Taiichi Ohno's book published in 1978, Toyota Production System -- Beyond Large-Scale Production. Today, organizations decide whether to support Scrum, Kanban, other Agile methodologies or multiple methodologies -- and what aspects of each Agile practice to mature.

• In Agile's early days, small teams could get away with whiteboards, index cards, sticky notes and spreadsheets to define requirements and track work in progress. Today, there are many Agile project management tools to consider, and more importantly, Agile leaders must consider how best to implement the organization's Agile practices with them.

• Today, Agile leaders must consider what level of detail goes into a story card. Does the product owner write them, or are teams using business analysts to capture technical details? Are you organizing themes, epics and features or fewer levels of hierarchy? Are the portfolio management and reporting capabilities from the Agile tool sufficient, or is your organization scaling Agile with product and portfolio management tools or customizing reporting dashboards?

• There is an ongoing debate on whether and how to estimate in Agile, with some of the early approaches presented by James Grenning's 2002 paper on planning poker and Mike Cohn's 2005 book on Agile Planning and Estimation. Today, tools support estimating in story points and effort hours, enable tracking applied hours and offer approaches to capturing business value.

• As technology platforms evolve, so too has the debate on how to integrate software development practices with Agile. Extreme programming is one example where management and technical practices are highly intertwined. Today, DevOps practices, especially automating with continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD), using machine learning to monitor applications (AIOps) and applying Agile to manage technical debt are all examples of the intersections between Agile and technology best practices.

Agile's future in transforming the culture and enabling emerging technologies

I suspect that Agile practices, tools, frameworks and methodologies will continue to evolve over the next two decades. Agile leaders will debate how to empower self-organizing teams while still maintaining Agile practice standards. Agile practices that became a lot more design-driven when mobile development became strategic will evolve to better support applications developed for IoT and with machine learning capabilities. Finally, while applying Agile in regulated industries is better defined today, more industries will be regulated and require evolving Agile practices accordingly.

But the most significant opportunity over the next decade will be how organizations will use Agile, innovation and experimentation to transform the business and the culture. The transformation will happen as more technology groups align Agile and DevOps, invest in change management and take greater steps to drive agile collaboration.