Steve Rosenbaum sent me some questions about agile. I found the questions and responses interesting enough to post here:

1- Tell me about “agile” is it a programming philosophy or a human philosophy?

It is a general worldview, one of granting importance to person-to-person interactions, of quick feedback, of collaboration, of recognizing that changes in the world can change the goals we set. This worldview is as important in business as it is in software development, as it is in human relations.

Thus one would not ask, “Can something be done in agile?”, but “How would someone holding the ‘agile’ worldview approach this situation?”

2- When you think of Agile, explain how it has grown, and how it has applicability beyond the world of software.

In 2001, we were thinking primarily of software development, how we worked as contrasted to how so many people seemed to work. Shortly thereafter, it became clear that substituting the word ‘product’ for the word ‘software’, all the values transferred to product development in general; and later that by squinting a bit at the words, it applied to many human activities. I have used the ideas in the agile canon in positive ways to manage my children’s homework, my house remodeling projects, the design of conferences, and the publication of my books. Many others have done the same.

The 2005 “Declaration of InterDependence” (http://pmdoi.org) captured this generalization of the agile manifesto to management in general.

Companies find that as they apply the ideas in the agile manifesto to software development, these ideas affect how the sales department works, how upper management works, how suppliers and customers work, generally for the better. They get smaller results sooner, and thus can change directions more easily, thus enabling closer conversations between customers, management, development, and suppliers, which in turn makes it easier to create products that better fit the needs of consumers and business. And so on.

At this point, the biggest limitation in the application of these ideas is people getting stuck on the word ‘software’ and not making the generalization to their other activities.

3- Can Agile be a business philosophy?

Absolutely. In fact, “agile” was a business term years before we used it in software development, and had almost the same definition or purpose. Perhaps it was just that the software industry said how to pull off the agile approach. But close interaction, tight feedback, collaboration, and dealing with changing circumstances should be core business values and capabilities.

4- Why is speed good? Isn’t it dangerous

Speed is good and speed is bad: High-speed reactiveness is good; haste is bad. Former US Air Force Colonel John Boyd is famous for describing the importance of the OODA loop (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OODA_loop) in being able to turn a tighter circle – react and change directions – faster than the opponent. That is speed as high-speed reactiveness.

Haste is not so good. Hasty programming produces software systems that are internally complicated and therefore hard to change. Once hard to change, they fail the OODA-loop test – the opponent can react faster than you can.

“Agile software development” gets called “speedy” because we have learned how to get business value out of less, thus sooner. So the software process seems to be speedy. Hopefully, however, the team writes the system carefully, not hastily.

It is a general hazard in the agile community to act tactically and with haste. A few have called for us to find an acceptable for the word “slow” in the software, as in “thoughtfully considered”. We’re still missing that word. As a result, agile experts have to keep warning beginners to pay attention to longer-term horizons, to strategies, plans and design quality, so that high-speed-reactiveness (the OODA loop) can be preserved.

5- Explain how customers become partners?

In the best cases, the business asks the clients what they want in such a way that the clients come to help steer the project. After each (frequent) delivery, the clients converse with the business in such a way that they start to become discussion partners and co-steer the product’s development. Obviously, this works better with small client bases, and is harder to accomplish (and maybe less meaningful) with large consumer bases, as is the case with shrink-wrapped products and consumer devices.

In the web world, however, “crowd-sourcing” is much more common, and represents both agility and customer-as-partner.

6- Do you see a time when the whole world is “Agile?”

Not really. The agile mindset demands a certain level of tolerance for uncertainty, ambiguity and flux. By and large, people prefer the opposites: certainty, clarity, stability. This suggests to me that the agile approach will hit a limit once it reaches those people who can handle the needed amount of uncertainty, ambiguity and flux, plus those people whose jobs depend on withstanding the discomfort associated with those. I put that number at 40%, no more than 60% of the population, or jobs.

Long before that threshold is reached, the Next Big Thing will arrive, and the early adopters will shift their attention to that alleged silver bullet.

7- Does Agile mean sleeping less (grin)

Quite the opposite. During the dot-com boom, I had friends in San Francisco at two different startups. The people in the startup using agile techniques worked Monday to Friday, maybe ten hours a day, and took the weekends off. They make sharp progress in small steps, showing their results often. The people in the other startup worked seven days a week, as many hours as they could withstand, not having anything to demonstrate month after month. People will always get overworked, people will often choose to overwork, but working in the agile fashion is more likely to increase peace of mind.