Agile Adoption

A comment from "AMWOP" states: "Unfortunately while progressive developers may want to work in an Agile fashion the ecosystem around them is frequently fighting against being Agile. Executives, Customers, Testers, Business planners and many other stakeholders insist on detailed, committed plans up front which give them a (false) sense of confidence about viability of long range plans for software delivery. This in fact drives the developers back towards waterfall methodologies. It won't be until these functions change their mindset that Agile processes will make significant inroads in commercial environments."

I wholeheartedly agree. As with most things, adoption takes time. This is a classic example of crossing the chasm. Currently, Agile is in the visionary and early adopter phase. The software development habits that people have now took years to form. It will take many more years before they change.

In addition, the infrastructure for widespread adoption is not yet there. There are lots of books that you can buy, but they are mostly oriented towards the early adopter. On the software development tools side, most are still oriented towards waterfall methodologies. This is changing, but slowly.

This is no surprise. Change takes time. My prediction is that in 5 years time, we will drop the term "Agile Development" and just talk about software development because we'll no longer need to make the distinction between Agile and non-Agile. Instead, people will talk about how often you release because everybody will be doing short iterations. I also predict that Agile will evolve to the point that people stop saying that you might as well just throw up your hands on predictability because they will realize that Agile actually gives you the opportunity to be more predictable. More on that later.