pliantalliance.org

JK has written a post-agilism faq which explains well all the things those of us moving past Agile have been talking about over the last couple of years. Post-agilism to me is the more general description for what I did in founding the pliantalliance.org. I moved past Agile and started to think about what was good about it and what wasn’t. I started encouraging others to do the same. It turns out that I wasn’t the only one doing this and Jonathan came along and coined the term ‘post-agilism’ to describe what we all were doing.

To quote Jonathan:

There is no manifesto. This is not an organized group - it is a phenomenon of people around the world who have some sort of Agile experience, and have independently moved on.

I’m not sure everyone actually gets the point of view those of us talking about pliant software development and post-agilism and the like are coming from. We aren’t starting a movement, we are describing one. We aren’t trying to change peoples’ minds, we are trying to get people to think about what they are doing and not just blindly accept what the latest “consultant” hired by head office to ‘revolutionize our software process’ is saying.

I said it before and I’ll say it again… I don’t know how you should build your software. No one but you can figure that out.

What Agile has become is the exact opposite and _that_ is why it appears pliancy and post-agilism are explicitly anti-Agile. We aren’t anti-Agile, we’ve just moved on.

Some people however, _still_ can’t agree on what Agile is. They still think Agile is about the Agile Manifesto, when in reality, the book sellers and conference promoters moved on from the manifesto years ago. Agile (and every other ‘process’ being hawked to unsuspecting enterprises) is about selling stuff and if you can’t see that, then I can’t help you move on. Denying a problem doesn’t actually solve it.

Now that the March issue of Better Software Magazine is long out the door, I can post the pdf of the article I wrote for that issue.. The content was heavily based on some posts on this blog and the opportunity was a direct result of JK finding this site. So thanks goes out to him and +1 for blogging. I’ll probably blog more about the overall experience on my other blog at some point.