The Agile Scam
If you’re a software engineer, you may have felt increasingly frustrated by Agile software development lately. If that describes you and you’re not sure why, then this article is definitely for you. Agile has had seemingly innocent beginnings, attempting to standardize and improve software development practices. This was supposed to help teams move faster and release better software. However, what has happened is that Agile has been turned into nothing more than a money grab. Let’s explore that a bit more.
Agile Beginnings
I wanted to go over the history of Agile briefly. Before we start looking into why I think it’s become a scam, I think historical context would help to understand where it came from.
Agile started in the Spring of 2000. A group of software developers gathers in Oregon to discuss improving software development. For some context, the primary methodology that had been followed up until this point was mainly waterfall.
A very simple comparison of Agile and Waterfall
The illustration above can help us visualize the difference between the two methodologies. In Waterfall, each step must be completed before the next one can begin. It’s very rigid and doesn’t allow for much retrospection or reiteration of each completed step.
In Agile, you can see that things happen in a loop. We start with the same design step, but we can come back around to design, test, or develop. It’s more flexible and allows us to revisit previous steps and fix potential issues.
This is not meant to compare the two thoroughly, just a simple overview. We can see how Agile was an improvement over Waterfall. In this simple view, Agile seems a lot more flexible, giving us faster and safer releases.
The Manifesto
A screenshot from https://agilemanifesto.org/
Around a year later, the same group of developers met again in Utah. This meeting was to hash out the principles of Agile we call the Agile Manifesto. I have no issues with the Agile Manifesto. It gives some overarching tenets of producing software that is generally good. They make it flexible in that they’re not saying to throw one or the other out but giving priority to one over the other without discounting the value of the other.
Spreading the message
In order to spread the message more effectively the Agile Alliance website was created. It is classified as a non-profit that promotes Agile education. This is where Agile really took off. Many teams using waterfall became interested in Agile and started adopting Agile practices.
Where it all went wrong
From innocent beginnings, a movement formed. It had the potential to do great things or not so great things. In the beginning, I would say that it had a positive impact since it was initially an improvement on Waterfall. However, with popularity came the incentive to make money. Now, the Agile Alliance is classified as a non-profit and offers a lot of free resources. As a non-profit, you can support the Agile Alliance by becoming a member, and they offer many different membership tiers. This is all normal, and there’s not much to examine here.
However, with the popularity of Agile booming, other companies definitely wanted to get in on it. There is another non-profit called the Scrum Alliance that Ken Schwaber formed. This is a bit different from the Agile Alliance, in that they have a lot more paid classes. When I say paid classes, I mean you could pay up to $1,000 to become a scrum master. That also includes the $750 per year you have to pay to maintain your scrum master license. That’s quite a steep price to pay for working individuals.
One of the ways they get most of their support is by getting corporations to pay that price on behalf of their employees. If you look at the Scrum Alliance website you’ll notice that they’re boasting about their over $4 million dollar investment into the community.
That’s just the money they’ve spent on spreading the Scrum/Agile message to expand their community.
To put this into perspective, according to Nonprofit Impact Matters, 97% of accredited 501(c)(3) have budgets of less than $5 million dollars.
As a non-profit, we can easily look up the tax returns of the Scrum Alliance. We can see that in 2019 the Scrum Alliance brought in almost $20 million. To compare, the Agile Alliance brought in less than $2 million.
We can also see how much they spend on salaries for their officers. Their CEO earns around $260,000 per year.
The median pay for non-profit CEOs is around $183k. That puts the CEO of the Scrum Alliance in the top 80% of non-profit CEOs in terms of pay.
I want to be clear; there isn’t anything illegal or untoward about any of their compensation structures or their income. This is all to say that Scrum and Agile can be incredibly profitable, and there is a lot of money to be made.
Enter Agile Coaching
With the popularity of Agile, coaching companies started popping up like cockroaches. Just Google “Agile Training,” and you’ll see a plethora of courses available by a bunch of different places. Search for Agile training on Udemy and you’ll see hundreds of courses ranging from $50 to $150.
In my opinion, this has turned Agile from something that was meant to help produce software faster and more efficiently into a complete money grab. I think it has degraded the core tenants of the Agile Manifesto so that more courses can be sold to more people quicker. Their business model has turned from “produce the highest quality agile teams” to “churn out as many Agile coaches as possible.”
Agile in the modern day
If you’ve worked as a part of an Agile team in the last 3 to 5 years you’ve probably had the same experience I have. You have a Scrum Master who is usually a non-technical person. They make all the tickets for you to work on, and you’re not allowed to question them. You have 15–20 minutes of your time wasted every morning in standup meetings. These standup meetings typically take place about an hour or so after you’ve started working, so your concentration is completely broken and you have to get back into it. The standup meetings are typically useless with no value added and you’re not allowed to skip the meetings even if there is nothing to report. You get more time wasted in retrospective meetings, sprint planning meetings, and sprint review meetings that could have been used for something helpful but are typically wasted time. During sprint planning, you’re unable to question story points or modify them from whatever the Scrum master has said is their standard. You’re told you must unquestioningly follow all of the rigid Agile processes the Scrum master has outlined for you.
To be fair, this does not cover 100% of the use cases. I’m sure there are plenty of people out there who are happy with how their Agile process works. If that’s you, then that’s great. However, we cannot ignore the degradation of what Agile initially meant. This is the scam that is being played on developers. Agile has become the thing they said they’d replace: strict processes that hinder actual software development.
