The move toward agility has led to many benefits for the software industry. It has broken the tyranny of the prescriptive waterfall approach to software engineering, an approach that was causing more and more large project failures, and it has allowed software developers to keep up with the ever-increasing demand for more innovative IT solutions.
It has enabled many companies to do great things but in many cases has led to a culture of entitlement, heroic programming, and short-term thinking that threatens the sustainability of the parent companies and the IT solutions on which they depend.
Little or no thought is put into maintainability, the heroes become potential single points of failure, and the cost of keeping the lights on just keeps growing and growing.
What is needed is a way to maintain the values of agility while making software development more an engineering discipline than a craft—a new form of agile software engineering fit for the Internet Age.
