How a rebellion became a bureaucracy
Few movements in software have been as successful as Agile. What began as a reaction against heavyweight process, exhaustive documentation, and centralised planning became the dominant way organisations talk about building software. And somewhere in that success it acquired certifications, prescribed ceremonies, maturity models, governance structures, a consulting industry, and dedicated management hierarchies, which is to say it acquired most of the things it was a reaction against. The question worth asking is narrow. Not whether Agile succeeded, and not the broad point that institutions reshape ideas, but the specific mechanism. By what steps does a critique of bureaucracy turn into a bureaucracy, when nobody involved wanted that outcome? ...