QUEST: Do We Still Need Agile in 2023?

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Hello, and welcome to 2023.

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I'm your host, Richard Bown, and this is the Software Delivery podcast.

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Although it's not the Software Delivery Club podcast anymore, after recording

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a few episodes at the end of last year where I was talking increasingly

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about Legacy, I decided it's time for a reboot for the new year.

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So I'm gonna call it from now on Loving Legacy because I do love

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legacy and I love to talk about it.

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So I hope you stick with me.

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I hope you enjoy today's episode, which is all about agile.

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Well, actually, it's not about Agile.

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. The point is we don't wanna talk about Agile, we wanna talk about writing code,

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we wanna talk about delivering code.

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So the question I'm asking is, do we need to worry about Agile in 2023?

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Do we need to worry about Agile or any of the other things that

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give us lists of stuff to do?

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And what can we do about these things?

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So for example, let's look at diving straight in.

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Let's look at the Agile Manifesto.

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The Agile Manifesto if you've not seen it, you should go and check it out.

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I'll link it in the notes, check it out, and you'll see that there are four tenets

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basically that you live by in the Agile manifesto about preferring individuals

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and interactions over processes and tools, working software over comprehensive

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documentation, customer collaboration over contract negotiation, responding

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to change over following a plan.

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So that is the basis of the Agile manifesto.

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And I think as any software engineer would agree, or software developer,

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programmer, whatever you wanna call 'em, would agree, these are good things.

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You know, you want to be able to build stuff that the customer uses.

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Punt full stop.

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What the Agile manifesto then goes on to say is there are 12

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principles around which we can base our development practice.

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And this is where I start to get a little bit confused.

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I think everyone does, cuz once you've got four things, you can

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remember them in your head easily.

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Although I've had to read them.

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Um, when you've got 12 things, it's much more complicated.

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So I was watching a YouTube the other day with John Romero, um, the guy

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Behind ID software along with John Carmack and, a couple of other guys

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created Wolfenstein, 3d, Wolfenstein, quake and Doom in the nineties.

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The original first person shooter games the ones that changed the

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universe for gaming essentially.

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So when John Romero speaks, you tend to listen because he's been there, done that

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in a small team, small high performing team, and the YouTube discussion where

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I saw him speak this week was really interesting, and he also created a list

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of 10 things, which great development teams have, and I'm thinking 10.

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Okay, that's a good number, but again, it's too many for my small brain.

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How can I fit all these things into my brain?

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Then I'm thinking about other stuff that I've read, such as Gene Kim's

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Unicorn Project where he has the five ideals and he also in the Phoenix

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project has the three ways and the four methods of communication.

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These are all good, but we've got like, now how many?

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10 plus 12 plus three plus four plus five.

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I dunno.

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We've got about 30 things to remember and where are the similarities?

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Are these all different?

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Anyway, as part of that, I wanted to make a list, a small list.

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Less than 10 things.

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Less than six things, ideally, where I could remember what it

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means to be a good software.

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to build stuff well, and I did some analysis.

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I looked at the agile Manifesto.

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I looked at John Romero's things.

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I looked at the five ideals, and I'd also looked at a few other things as

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well to see, well, how can these kind of dissemble into a smaller pile?

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And I came up with some interesting results.

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Well, I came up with five results, which I can remember.

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And the best thing about this is that I made it into an acronym.

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And the acronym is called Quest.

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And Quest stands for, I'm Reading Quality, unrestricted

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end user simplicity and teamwork.

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I'm not gonna explain how I got from the Agile Manifesto and from John Romero's

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list of 10 and from Gene Kim's stuff and from other things down to this list in

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this podcast, cuz that would just be a tedious list of me reading stuff out.

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But for now, it's enough for you to know two things in 2023 that my quest will

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be to make legacy software much more interesting for all of you out there.

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Remember Quest.

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I will come back to it in future episodes, I'm sure, and in the

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meantime what I will do is I'll write up what I've discovered and I will

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put a link in the show notes too.

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So please check it out and please gimme some feedback

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As to the premise of this episode, I do believe that Agile or Prince.

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or parts of agile like Scrum, CanBan, et cetera, or project management or

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ways of imposing a framework upon delivery of software is a bad thing.

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And another thing, if you listen to John Romero's talk, he's basically saying,

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there were four or five of us, we sat in a room together, we discussed stuff.

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They didn't even have source control, so they just passed around a floppy disk.

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They didn't even have a network share to begin with.

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They passed around a floppy disk and copied the software

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from machine to machine.

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They.

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like that, and they worked in a manner where they had to communicate more often.

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If we give our communication to each other via a tool via a Jira or Azure,

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Azure DevOps, or via GitHub issues, then we lose something immediately.

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I know that we can't all sit in a room together anymore, or we can't even

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work together all the time anymore, however, Shouldn't we just try it?

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Could we do a mob programming thing where we all work together

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all the time on the same stuff?

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Could we just not follow some of these archetypes, some of these

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things that have been said before?

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One way that we can avoid this trap of being stuck in an agile death march in

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some ways, and by going through all of the ceremonies is by just by changing our

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brains as developers and thinking, okay, maybe we don't need to get annoyed by it.

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We don't need to get pulled into the trap of seeing Agile as a

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distraction to our day-to-day.

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We do the meetings, we do the way that we work, and we just work

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together in the way that we want to.

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So, what I'm suggesting here is a trade off.

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A trade-off between doing the agile doing the project management

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or doing whatever you need to do.

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To make sure that you can do the good development work.

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So.

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When you're thinking about this going into 2023.

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Don't see it as your foe.

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Don't see it as your enemy in order to be vanquished, don't see that you need

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to spend your, your time and your energy.

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Arguing how things should be organized in your teams . Go with

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the flow focus on the software.

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Work like John Romero and John Carmack and the rest of them . take that spirit

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of adventure, that passion, the spirit of building stuff that is cool into

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everything that you do this year.

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And don't worry about the agile.

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Don't worry about the lists.

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I've got your covered for that.

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I'm so excited for 2023.

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I'm so excited for this episode.

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I hope you can feel that.

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Um, I'm really excited to be able to share this list of quest

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stuff with you in the notes below.

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Please.

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Let me know what you think.

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Please let me know if I'm completely off target.

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But would love to hear from you.

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This is Richard Bown on loving legacy.

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Wishing you a very happy 2023.

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And look forward to speaking to you next time.