[drewcoo]

Fair enough.

Agile was a response to heavy process. And systems where people's jobs were all about adding more process to the already heavy process. Process hell.

In the couple of decades since little "a" agile really got adoption:

1. many people have not seen v-model or spiral model and their attendant process wonks

2. agile was turned into Agile and became a way to micromanage, first micromanagement with no rules, then later, more and more "Agile rules"

So now we have SAFe, which is sort of the worst of both worlds: micromanagement plus a smothering blanket of process.

But back to the point . . . the intention was never to create the ultimate system that was totally amazing but only when staffed with complete experts who were also psychically connected. The intention was to ditch process hell.

[MattPalmer1086]

Well, not sure process hell was eradicated, although it ironically moved to the very people who were supposed to be freed of it!

What has changed is that the business expects to be able to push new features through quickly with faster releases. In the past, it took a long time for the business to get changes made.

Part of that I think was that highly technical departments had more control over their output and schedule. It was all mysterious to everyone else. If the business wanted to do something, there would be meetings and documents and analysis and approval decisions. It was hard, it was complex.

As technology has become commoditised and less mysterious I think the power of the techical wizards has waned. So the business likes the idea they can just ask for stuff and it gets released fairly quickly and with much less ceremony and negotiation from their perspective.

[drewcoo]

> Well, not sure process hell was eradicated

My point is that process hell was not eradicated. And in most instances, we ended up with process hell plus micromanagement.

> the business expects to be able to push new features through quickly with faster releases

Oh, I f'in' wish . . . Not enough companies want rapid release, a.k.a. low-risk, customer-centric culture. If more did, I'd have more work because I can do that really well, but managers assume provably true things are magic, because . . . professional managers.

> As technology has become commoditised [sic] and less mysterious

That is a whole ton of crap, son. Tech is not lumber or oranges or coal. It's not a g'damned commodity because we are not commodities. Much as far-distant managers of funds would like to think otherwise. (Or think what they do is different from what we do, in fact.)

Nor is it mysterious. It's more logical than most professions, even the (other?) degreed ones! Ask me to write code to do FOO while robbing BAR to pay BAZ and I can do that and prove to you that it works. This ain't physics or psychology or philosophy . . . I can make it work and prove it works. No hand-waving. No nonsense. Works. Period.

[MattPalmer1086]

It certainly was more mysterious to most back then. My first experience of computing was in an air conditioned room, there were spinning tapes and flashing lights and staff wore white coats. That was in the late 1970s.

It has gradually become less of a bastion of technical wizards and more of a commodity service to the business and society at large, like getting electricity and water.