Agile 2

15Conclusion

Agile 2 brings many additional ideas into the fold of Agile. These ideas are often used by those who practice Agile well, but they have not been part of Agile per se—yet they need to be, because Agile cannot work well without them.

Some important ideas and topics are misunderstood or misrepresented by much of the Agile community. One of them is leadership. The importance of leadership is well established: people have written about it for thousands of years. In the context of product development, some important recent books provide ample discussion of leadership and its importance. For example, in Accelerate, by Forsgren, Humble, and Kim, there is an entire chapter on leadership. In that chapter, they ask,

“Why have technology practitioners continuously sought to improve the approach to software development and deployment as well as the stability and security of infrastructure and platforms, yet, in large part, have overlooked (or are unclear about) the way to lead, manage, and sustain these endeavors?…we must improve the way we lead and manage IT.”¹

Mark Schwartz, wrote in his book A Seat at the Table,

“Agile approaches seem to remove IT leaders from the value-creation process. In an Agile process, visioning, refinement, and acceptance of system capabilities are in the hands of product experts and users—that is, the folks from the business side. Delivery teams work directly with users and product owners from the enterprise lines of business to decide what is ...