IBM Is Going Agile

Alternate headline: &quot;Agile Development Ski-Jumps Over Shark!&quot;<p>Alternate alternate headline: &quot;Final Nail in Agile Development Coffin is Big and Blue.&quot;<p>Agile is dead. Long live the new development process buzzwords.<p>It is now time again to rename everything, come up with new jargon and trademarks to describe the patterns and anti-patterns of the development processes that actually work for us, and set those words free. Then they can be co-opted and peddled by consultants. Afterward, they are embraced, extended, and extinguished by management. And then the new words change meaning to describe all the old things, and the circle of business buzzwords turns anew.

Agile in a big company:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;dilbert.com&#x2F;strip&#x2F;2005-11-16" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;dilbert.com&#x2F;strip&#x2F;2005-11-16</a><p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;dilbert.com&#x2F;strip&#x2F;2007-11-26" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;dilbert.com&#x2F;strip&#x2F;2007-11-26</a>

I worked at IBM for 5 years, and some of the teams I was on used &quot;agile&quot; development methods. In that they used the names, but our &quot;scrums&quot; were an hour long, in a meeting room, with everyone bringing their laptop. Management more than 1 level up expected waterfall-like development, so it all just meshed badly.<p>I really don&#x27;t hold out much hope that this is going to work out that well without a whole bunch of training and people actually wanting it.

Ouch. My heart goes out to all those men and women at IBM who are about to get &quot;Agiled&quot;.

I&#x27;m surprised that there is no mention of Rational Team Concert:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www-03.ibm.com&#x2F;software&#x2F;products&#x2F;en&#x2F;rtc" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www-03.ibm.com&#x2F;software&#x2F;products&#x2F;en&#x2F;rtc</a><p>Used in a big way to implement Agile within IBM and provides a nice coherent system for task management.

&quot;The mission is to have innovation and the speed of small companies...&quot;<p>If they keep laying off people, eventually they <i>will</i> be a small company. Problem solved!

I&#x27;d trust this all more if it was coming from the teams back up, rather than edict going down.

Enterprise companies are all going agile this year, I bet someone from Gartner is suggesting this shift... and the result is clearly not that effective.

(<i>standard disclaimer - I do not speak for IBM. I&#x27;m not even a current employee</i>)<p>We were doing this at big blue seven years ago IIRC, and while it&#x27;s a large company to transition like this, I don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s exactly new.<p>It&#x27;s not quite agile as the writers of the agile manifesto would have it, but then most &#x27;agile&#x27; seems beset by consultants and process, and IBM probably do it better than a bunch of other places I&#x27;ve worked.<p>RTC is a bit of a heavyweight and quite unwieldy though. Give me git and a text editor any day of the week....

#1) Nothing says Agile like top down process design!<p>#2) I didn&#x27;t quite believe Michael O Church&#x27;s anti-Agile essay [1], but nothing justifies it more than this quote:<p>&gt; The system is designed to foster accountability. And with that, finally, comes speed.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;michaelochurch.wordpress.com&#x2F;2014&#x2F;06&#x2F;20&#x2F;on-programmers-deadlines-and-agile&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;michaelochurch.wordpress.com&#x2F;2014&#x2F;06&#x2F;20&#x2F;on-programme...</a>

That seems unlikely. Big companies like big ships have a lot of inertia. They may adapt &quot;Agile&quot;, but almost certainly in name only.

If IBM didn&#x27;t use Agile, what did they use?<p>The non-greedy benefit of Agile is that work and how work happens becomes more understandable in a consistent and reasonably-well studied manner.

if IBM says its &quot;going agile&quot; then its time to start funeral arrangements for agile.

like putting lipstick on a pig...