Ask HN: How did agile took over the whole industry?

4 points by nudpiedo 1 year ago | 4 comments

What is the exact story on how agile, scrum and others took the whole industry?

Not asking about the story presented as counterpart against Waterfall or the story of its idea development from Takeuchi & Nonaka or yet another well deserved criticism over its real world implementation, but how from a social and business perspective it took over the whole industry. I know it is not 100% of the companies, but most of them, and now it is even expanding to other industries.

Was it an incentive for management control? Did it have influencers and evangelists? Was there some tupperware scheme on selling titles and courses? just the promise of streamlined progress and predictability together with ending the contrast against the waterfall issues? was it because it is easier to pivot and adapt to change due continuous deliver? was it part of a larger atractor of rejecting long term planning, like now very few people do proper business plans and long term planning, etc?

Please keep it on the sociocultural and business aspect.

apothegm 1 year ago |

Historically a ridiculous percentage of software projects either failed entirely or suffered massive overruns.

For larger, older companies, big-A Agile consultancies were able to sell training and services by touting Agile as a way to achieve savings. They may have even succeeded to some degree at achieving a higher likelihood of eventual delivery and lower overruns.

Smaller companies and early stage startups wanted and needed more lightweight processes. Those that used little-a agile were more likely to succeed and grow instead of going out of business. So there’s a survivor bias at play.

Then everyone else cargo cults and copies whoever looks like they know what they’re doing.

nudpiedo 1 year ago | |

I guess faster reaction times might have been decisive for many early startups.

Nowadays is another story because everyone does and cargo cults are in place.

apothegm 1 year ago | | |

Sure. But going back to waterfall isn't going to improve reaction times for anyone. So still only the agile shops survive.

dtagames 1 year ago |

The short answer is that it appeals to managers who are not themselves developers and believe that software can be reproduced through a factory process, like other supply chain goods. Scrum also produces lots of metrics and artifacts which these managers, lacking an understanding of code, use to judge progress and product performance.

Because scrum aligns with the way managers think and produces output they like, it gets ordered into existence. It doesn't align with developer methods nor produce what devs want (working code), so therein lies the rub.