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Why Agile Persists
And who it’s actually for
If you’ve never heard of agile, it’s a software development principle that’s been declared dead many times and is lampooned by many developers in the industry as being a waste of time. It has a set of principles that exist to distance it from Waterfall (the traditional project management technique still common in manufacturing), but I won’t repeat them here.
Just imagine meetings every week or two to discuss short term increments (Sprints), planning meetings on a similar cadence, stand up meetings every day to talk over tickets on a board, and you have most of the broad brushstrokes of Agile.
While developers might dislike it, here’s why it will continue to exist.
It’s Not for Developers… It’s for Everyone Else
Developers primarily interact with a system by using coding tools (GitHub, IDEs) and by interacting with cloud deployment tools (Terraform, cloud consoles, CI/CD pipelines). All of this information is generally more useful than the analogues Agile operates on, Stories (small increments) and Epics (big increments).
But people that aren’t developers (managers, product, quality) don’t use those coding tools. They don’t have boots on the ground, either because they don’t have the technical expertise or the time.
