Today, I read an article in Hacker News warning of the impending decline of Agile. This shouldn’t really be news to anyone. It’s known, if not perfectly understood, that ideas have a life cycle as they permeate the minds of the masses. This life cycle is made most obvious in the business world where strong competition exists for ideas (resulting mainly from the quantity of competitors rather than quality) and where major publications are constantly pushing new ideas into the system (as a way to extract revenue from the market of those seeking ideas).
The communities that exist in the business and software worlds share many traits with regard to information exchange. There are buzzwords. There are always novel ideas for decreasing cost, improving quality, shortening production time, and improving morale. Adoption is followed by eventual abandonment. (It should be intuitive that one cannot apply every idea presented in succession without first eliminating a commitment to those which precede it.)
An idea’s cycle of life is correlated to how well it’s understood within the community. The originators of ideas and processes generally possess a nuanced understanding of them. These people apply their knowledge in order to solve specific problems, with specific constraints, and in specific organizations. As time progresses, and the ideas are adopted by greater numbers, the subtleties that make the ideas work are lost. The emphasis changes from essence to detail.
Once Agile was no longer perceived in essence as a method of communication—once it was perceived as a detailed process of software development—it was destined to be supplanted by whatever silver bullet is to follow.
