Devastated Wasteland

Why “devastated wasteland”?

Kent Beck, a signer of the legendary agile manifesto, responded with this phrase during an interview in 2020. It’s an evocative phrase, perfectly placed to get a reader riled up and engaged with the purpose of these processes, practices and principles.

You signed the Agile Manifesto almost 20 years ago. How do you feel about agile now?

It’s a devastated wasteland. The life has been sucked out of it. It’s a few religious rituals carried out by people who don’t understand the purpose that those rituals were intended to serve in the first place.
— Kent Beck

FrAgile

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Donec lacinia iaculis ultricies. Morbi non dictum neque, vel commodo erat. Praesent placerat libero at nisl efficitur tristique. Vivamus id nulla a nibh euismod eleifend. Etiam malesuada lectus sit amet eros semper, at fringilla lorem malesuada. Curabitur faucibus pellentesque lacinia. This sums up “agile” well enough.

Use the Uppercase-A Agile

I used to use “Agile.” Then I used “agile.” Now I no longer use the word at all. It started as a principle, it endured as a buzzword, and it ended on the tail end of a fad. Now it comes with a certification and a laminated card.

Who’s update is it anyway?

Let’s see, I went to a bunch of meetings, looked at incomplete and poorly written “stories” and I restarted my computer six times for no reason. No blockers, well, except this meeting.

Standup is for telling folks what you’re doing right now and what you might work on shortly. It’s not a race, it’s not a competition, it’s not a game. It’s a brief nexus to coordinate, it’s a place for a humble plea for help.

It’s the show where everything’s made up and the points don’t matter.

Points and Pineapples

Points are silly. Work is not continuous. Teams are not uniform. Knowledge is not yet learned, expertise is not yet felt. Points are a desperate plea to commoditize the so-called delivery of software. How many points did you do this sprint? More? Awesome. Less? Grossly unacceptable. The discussion of value and the exploration of problem and solution space, that’s what is important here. Points are not. Next sprint we’re estimating in pineapples — just as accurate, twice as fun.

Distributed Dysfunction™

Who made these choices? Who are any of you? How could you do this? Let’s find out. The org chart is eventually consistent; the blame replicates instantly.

Architectural Faffery

It’s not intellectual faffery, but it might as well be. It’s when you decide that an interesting architecture matters more than the product in someone’s hands or it even working. By all means, use your service discovery queue mesh distributed scalable serverless PaaS. But before you do, let’s consider the facts. You have four users. Two of them are you.

The Entropy Builds Up

You listen to customers. You build what they want. You build what they need. You keep chasing the dream. Suddenly, your system is broken and you have nowhere left to turn. What went wrong? Entropy begins and ends all things. The burndown chart, it turns out, only ever burns up.

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One dispatch per sprint. Or per fad. Whichever ships first.

Four Corners, No Exit

Right angles are boring; nature never drew one. Yet somehow a productivity grifter has trapped your entire industry inside a four-box grid — Leaders, Challengers, Visionaries, and whatever corner they dropped you in — and called it a Magic Quadrant. Nature doesn’t do quadrants; it counts in spirals: one, one, two, three, five, eight. Notice what’s missing? Four. Four is too comfortable, too certain, too square.

We’re in a state of Jabberwocky

We’ve got the product you’ve always wanted. All you have to do is believe. And don’t do your research. The roadmap gyres, the KPIs gimble, and somewhere a stakeholder cries “callooh, callay!” Ship it.

Artificial Psychosis

Are you ready to revolutionize your entire engineering department with Artificial Intelligence? Reduce headcount by 30%, boost productivity by 30%, and cut defects by 30% — all at once, all this quarter! Quick, embrace AI before your competitors do and unlock astronomically transformative outcomes. As it turns out, every bit of that is predicated on having the exact opposite of a hype cycle: people to do the work, organizational clarity, a little free time, and an actual stra—[insufficient_funds::anthropic/claude_genesis]

End of the line

The gist is, my dear reader, that agile is four simple preferences. That’s it. Everything you ever learned, everything you thought you knew, everything you thought you were waiting to discover — it was all false. If all that specialization were the natural order, the specialization would not exist or be necessary. And it’s not. The natural order is the end of the line: go and do the work.

Let’s prevent the devastated wasteland together.