How modern is “Modern Agile”?

Tom Breur

26 March 2017 

Every so often, new “flavors” of Agile see the light. I will readily admit my bias: I don’t feel much has changed since 2001. That being said, I do see new angles into this domain as enriching Agile. If one of them works for you: great! The fact that I myself am inclined to “pile ‘m onto the same heap”, is just my bias. When I hear of something new and promising, I have a genuine interest. And when I heard Joshua Kerievsky’s name associated with “Modern Agile”, that was a reason moreover to delve a little deeper. He said many things about Agile in the past that made a lot of sense to me.

Of course you can’t have another Agile offspring without a website: http://modernagile.org/. I can’t help but wonder if their choice for four guiding principles:

·       Make people awesome

·       Make safety a prerequisite

·       Experiment and learn rapidly

·       Deliver value continuously

was in any way “inspired” by the fact that the http://agilemanifesto.org/ also happens to have four core values:

·       Individuals and interactions over processes and tools

·       Working software over comprehensive documentation

·       Customer collaboration over contract negotiation

·       Responding to change over following a plan 

To me, the Modern Agile principles all make a lot of sense. However, the question I have is: how “new” and “modern” are they? Number three “Experiment and learn rapidly” sounds an awful lot like the 12^th principle of the original Agile Manifesto: “At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly.” The first thought that came to mind when I saw the Modern Agile principle four “Deliver value continuously” was: “Hey! That sounds just like: Deliver working software frequently, from a couple of weeks to a couple of months, with a preference to the shorter time scale” (Agile Manifesto principle number three). Not much “new”, there, I would argue. Hardly “modern.”

For principles one and two, “Make people awesome” and “Make safety a prerequisite”, I am on the fence. “Make safety a prerequisite” is something I recognize and value, and it is clearly in line with the “old” Agile Manifesto. I don’t find it too much of a stretch to say it maps onto “Build projects around motivated individuals. Give them the environment and support they need, and trust them to get the job done” [italics added]. Imho there is genuine value in calling out the need for safety explicitly. For the first Modern Agile principle “Make people awesome” I could argue that it is a corollary to the people centric value of “Individuals and interactions over processes and tools”, but again, calling out that people centric management philosophy has its merit.

So where does this leave me? I see yet another “nouveau du jour” flavor of Agile. One that has merit, at least for me. There isn’t a thing I can disagree with, nor would I want to challenge any of it. But if you ask me to articulate how this is new, and hence “modern”, I really struggle to come up with a cogent answer…