What is Agile

I suppose Agile development has been adopted by almost the entire software industry.

What is Agile?

Agile has loads of acronyms, such as scrum, scrum master, sprint, backlog, task.

Agile has a number of ceremonies, such as sprint planning, daily standup, sprint retrospectives, backlog groomings.

Agile has sophisticated tools, such as jira, by Atlassian, Australia’s best software company.

Agile is popular

Even when I walked to train station, I heard people talking about Agile, blablabla….

But what is Agile in essence? Is it a ritual, a religion, a pattern or what?

I think

Agile is Micro-Management in Observer pattern or so called Reactive Micro-Management

Let me quote this famouse Observer pattern diagram:

Basically, Observer monitors the Subject, or Observable. Observable notifies the Observer proactively on every change.

In Agile, every member is both the Observable and Observer. Whatever we are working on, what obstable we have met, which task we have completed, we have to notify each other.

Is Agile micro-management? Yes it is. Everybody’s actions are refined and created as tasks.

Is Agile following the observer pattern? Yes it it. We are monitoring each other and reporting to each other.

So Agile is Micro-Management in Observer pattern or so called Reactive Micro-Management

BTW, From the management perspective, instead of asking the employee what you are busy with, now every employee has to report to their supervisors on a daily basis.