Читать книгу Agile 2 - Adrian Lander - Страница 12

Whenever something new and useful is created, people and organizations jump in to claim it and use it for their own purposes. Any change creates huge opportunities. For example, when Howard Head came out with the oversized Prince tennis racquet in the early 1970s, other manufacturers followed Head's lead and came out with racquets that departed from the standard size. One suddenly saw racquets on the market with very large nets and also ones that were only slightly larger than what was then the standard size.

The ones that were slightly larger became the most popular and came to be seen as the new standard size. These were called “midsize” racquets, although today we just call them racquets.¹²

The inevitable result was that everyone who owned a tennis racquet had to go out and buy a new one; otherwise, they were not adhering to the new “standard.” The sports equipment industry experienced a windfall in sales.

The rise of Agile did the same thing. There were new books, new websites, new consulting practices, and new frameworks that purported to be Agile. Agile quickly became a commodity to sell. It began with an Agile certification industry. Ken Schwaber introduced a two-day certification course for his Scrum framework: the Certified Scrum Master, aka CSM. By sitting in a training room for two days and not even taking a test (they do provide a simple test now), one could walk away with a certificate claiming to be a “master.”

Essentially the material that could be contained in a small pamphlet was the basis of what Human Resources staff and many hiring managers erroneously interpreted as a “master-level” certification.

Since Schwaber and his partner, Jeff Sutherland, claimed that Scrum was an Agile framework, it was something they could sell under the rising banner of Agile. Organizations that preferred to hire people with certifications made the CSM a requirement. People who had master's degrees from universities were dismayed at the naively perceived equivalence of a master's degree and a Certified Scrum Master certification. Highly qualified people were screened from job applications because they did not have the two-day CSM certification.

Industry groups sprang up: the Agile Alliance, the Scrum Alliance, Scrum.org , ICAgile, SAFe, LeSS, Kanban, and many others. The large consulting companies had a hard time learning about Agile, because Agile's central message of being lean and efficient and not having big contracted “phases” was antithetical to their model. Eventually they figured out how to incorporate it into their offerings, and today they all have substantial Agile practices, claiming to be the experts in Agile.

Thus, there is a lot of money today in the Agile industry, and the Agile community is arguably driven by moneyed interests, with a continuing tide of people seeking certifications in the various frameworks and becoming indoctrinated into them. The phrase Agile industrial complex, which might have been coined by Martin Fowler (one of the authors of the Agile Manifesto), has come to be used to refer to the industry as a commentary on the degree to which it is driven by financial interests rather than by ideas and efficacy.