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Agile is Dead (So is COBOL, XP, RAD, UML, SAFe, etc)
Why are people so excited to announce the death of software development paradigms?
“Agile is Dead” is a great clickbait headline. To commemorate the 20th anniversary of the publication of the Manifesto for Agile Software Development, all sorts of pundits came out of the woodwork to announce that Agile was dead. Agile is not the first 20-year-old software development paradigm to be declared dead. COBOL, eXtreme Programming, UML are a few others. Why are people so excited to announce the death of software development paradigms?
Somethings Never Die
The first fax was sent in 1860. The samurai in Japan were not abolished until 1868. That means there was a five-year period when a samurai could have sent Lincoln a fax warning him about his assassination in 1865. The online fax market will be over $1 billion this year — 161 years after the first fax. Some technologies just won’t die.
There are many paradigms in the software development industry that have been declared dead. Some include:
- COBOL (1959)
- Mark IV — First 4GL (1968)
- Structured Analysis & Design (1973)
- Information Engineering (1981)
- Rapid Application Development (RAD) (1991)
- Unified Modeling Language — UML (1995)
- Scrum (1996)
- Extreme Programming (1996)
- Manifesto for Agile Software Development (2001)
At one point or another, all of these approaches have been declared dead.
“Agile is Dead” is one of the quintessential examples of how software development paradigms are declared to be dead. In 2014 Dave Thomas, one of the original 12 signatories of the Agile Manifesto, published an article Agile is Dead (Long Live Agility). This led to many conferences inviting Dave to speak. When you search Google for “Agile is Dead” Dave’s presentation at GOTO 2015 Amsterdam pops up as #1. The presentation is 38 minutes long but well worth your time.
