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William Meller's avatar

There are so many things that people are breaking.

Let's take for example “working software”... That’s one of Agile’s values, right?

“Working software over comprehensive documentation.”

But now people use it as an excuse. “It works, so ship it.”

Never mind that it’s ugly. Hard to use. Full of tech debt. As long as it runs, it’s good enough.

But good software is more than “it works.” Agile was meant to make better software by helping people work better together.

But in many places, it’s used to go faster (another big misconception).

That’s the big mistake. Agile is not speed. It’s learning. It’s small feedback loops, fast experiments, early warnings. Speed is just a side effect when learning works.

But if you focus only on speed, you lose quality.

And once you lose quality, everything slows down.

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Kai-Uwe Rupp's avatar

"What's dead may never die!" (GoT: Mantra used by Drowned God faithfuls)

I agree with Jurgen that fighting over "is agile dead or not" is a complete waste of time.

Even if agile would be dead, agility would immediately rise again - or how else would we be able to process and design a future shaped by the fast paced developments we currently experience.

On Scrum Master (or other agile) certificates:

In my opinion they were only useful for a limited period of time in order to establish a very basic level of trust between players in the job and consulting markets that had no prior relationship. A means of facilitation for a first step in this new relationship. No certificate ever guaranteed a successful outcome of any kind!

On trust:

Hybrid organizations of human and AI agents are "open systems of autonomous agents" and as such will show indeterministic behavior, i.e. are complex systems. In such systems, trust is paramount, in order to establish an innovation culture. In solely human organizations, trust is build over time through interactions between the autonomous human agents that result in predictable and valuable / successful outcomes. Speaking a common language and transparency are enabling constraints for building trust.

One requirement, which I therefore formulate is:

"For open systems of autonomous human and AI agents (or "future work organizations") to achieve extraordinary outcomes, a common language that can be effortlessly understood by any type of agent is needed. Other, potentially more efficient languages for communication between agents (e.g. non-verbal in-between humans or digital between AI agents) can be used in parallel, but it must be ensured that communication in these additional languages can be losslessly translated into the common language (and vice versa) and that it is accessible for any agent in real time, if it chooses so."

I believe that without this, trust issues will arise in such organizations over time, which will ultimately negatively affect it's ability to innovate." And I guess innovation is what we are all hoping for, not just efficiency!

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