It seems to me that _________ is defined as whatever will make the most money for consulting firms and toolmakers, where the blank contains the latest buzzwords. I know that seems very cynical, but when you look at Agile tools as an example, they seem to still miss a lot of factors that affect software development, like prerequisites, bottlenecks, embedded intellectual capital, diminishing returns, risk and uncertainty, etc., resulting in massive under-estimation of project completion dates. They look custom-designed by those with a monetary interest in pushing a methodology that is designed to obsolete everything that came before and require buying their books and attending their lectures, not by people with a clear understanding of the economics of software development. The main effect of this is that non-developer executives and managers think that “Agile” means that they can squash project completion times down to a fraction of their historical completion dates. There is absolutely no evidence whatsoever to back up this expectation. The few studies that have been done on this are not encouraging. The Agile evangelists try to explain this by, in effect, saying that the bad results are because firms are not doing Agile right: “The ones that are implementing deeper and broader and getting real big payoffs are limited,” he continued. “I’d say one out of 10 big organizations are really taking it deep enough across the organization” to see the big payoff, he said. “One-third to one-half stall out pretty quickly. They hit plateaus and they stop. There are some organizational changes they’d have to make that they either can’t or are unwilling to get past.”

This does tie back to innovation though. Firms that short-circuit the development process through executive misunderstanding of Agile miss the time it takes to truly innovate. When deadlines are set too short, the time and resources that could have been dedicated to innovation are instead used up in an extended “crisis mode” of fixing bugs and trying desperately to get quality up to par with patches after a release. Innovation is not ready in time, and so, for example, they end up with infrastructure still being worked on in the time when the features that use that infrastructure should be worked on instead. The real question, in my opinion, is how does a firm break out of this cycle? How do they “make time to innovate”, once they have shorted out the development process? Can non-developer executives unlearn their misunderstanding of Agile?

I think the answers to these questions are important, because a firm that doesn’t innovate, because it has short-circuited the development cycle due to executive misunderstanding of Agile, has no real value added upon which to build a long term base for growth, and will plateau at a small percentage of the market. Developers will grow frustrated at the process, leave and this loss of intellectual capital will further exacerbate the problem. Once a firm gets into this vicious cycle, I suspect it gets very difficult, maybe even impossible, for it to get out.

For these and other reasons, I wonder if the term “Agile” is damaged goods now. Maybe it is downright dangerous to continue to use the term, because executives have by and large mis-learned the term. They think it simply means getting software done in a fraction of the time it used to take, and this kills real innovation.

That is, after all, the central proposition of Christianity, that Jesus died for your sins so that you might have all your guilt washed away. Christians are fond of claiming this shows God’s love for humanity, that it shows his goodness, that it is in fact the most “good” thing anyone has ever done. But they never stop to think about what it says about God’s sense of justice and morality. What does it say about the Christian God that he supposedly accepted this exchange? In any other context whatsoever, they would say such a judge is insane and unjust, that he is inverting morality by rewarding the guilty at the expense of the innocent. But when it comes to their god, they see only “the blood of the lamb”, not the blood on their god’s hands. They have trained themselves not to ask questions about “the Father” when gazing like sheep at “the Son”. Their Trinity is their escape hatch through which they imagine their escape route, to a land haunted by the Holy Ghost.

From believers, I’ve never seen a decent answer to this question of why it even makes any sense for the death of an innocent to be acceptable as recompense for the guilt of another. The very bedrock of Christianity is left exposed and naked, sitting on a foundation of transmogrified pagan beliefs in animal and human sacrifice. It is in the pagan beliefs from which Christianity and all modern religions descended that one finds the reason why slaughtering an innocent will assuage the wrath of the gods, because that is where you find the need to sacrifice the most unblemished thing one can find. In some ancient religions that was a young female virgin. In others, such as the old testament, it was the best of the cattle or sheep. In the New Testament, the apostle Paul has resurrected this concept in the ultimate human sacrifice, the death of Jesus Christ, who as the only perfect human being is the only possible satisfaction of the ancient pagan rituals that are brought to us even today by the major “monotheistic” religions. These vestiges of bronze-age fears and confused cause and effect have become the abstractions of modern man’s affections because they were wrapped into the sacred by an epileptic in ancient Rome, and now billions of people revel in “the blood of the lamb”.