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2020 Agile Predictions

The last days of 2019 are upon us, and our engineers are gearing up for the final sprint of the year. Given that Agile, or at least core parts of it, has become so commonplace in development these days, it can be tough to think of what's coming next. With that in mind, we've asked our contributors and contacts what they thought next year will look like, and here's what they had to say.

  • Badri N. Srinivasan, AVP and Enterprise Agile Coach/Lead, Agile Center, Societe Generale Global Solutions Center: All about scale: Agile methodologies will continue to grow in strength and more new projects will start with agile methodologies. Organizations already using agile for their projects will explore opportunities to scale the benefits at a much larger level through agile@scale models/frameworks. The scenario continues to look quite optimistic for agile methodologies in the next 6-12 months.

  • Bas Groot, Architect: More of the same: I hope to propagate my Premature/Foreseeable concept into the Agile world, but I'm not sure how quickly the message can be adopted. I need more people who get it and want to support the idea.

    But more likely is that Agile will become an increasingly hollow ritual and control structure coverup, until some new evangelist charlatan stands up and storms the conferences with the 10th rebirth/repackaging/rewording of what's called "agile" today.

  • Thomas Hansen, CEO/CTO, T.H. Rose Home Cloud: The right tool for the right job: The Agile community will (sigh) finally realise that it's impossible to implement Agile methodology without Agile tools ... ;)

  • Kunal Agarwal, CEO, Unravel Data: Conversation moves from technologies to use cases: Organizations increasingly care about the use cases a vendor supports rather than the specific data technology that vendor employs. In the past, many organizations thought that in order to leverage big data they had to deploy technology X or technology Y. That’s changing dramatically as we move into 2020, with these orgs paying less attention to the tech under the hood and instead focusing on delivering specialized use cases that advance their bottom line.

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The Agile Radar: An Approach for Understanding Agile

When coaching and training people on being Agile, we have often used the fabulous Agile Onion [1] from Simon Powers of Adventures With Agile. This is an amazing offering and has really helped us to coach others to be the best that they can be, time after time.

However, over the years there has been a couple of common observations that have constrained the wonderful impact it could have.

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The 6 Best Slack Alternatives for Effective Project Management

Slack is a popular collaboration tool that is becoming a natural choice for small- to medium-sized teams. It has a clean, intuitive interface that neatly organizes your conversations in the forms of chat rooms and associated options. Plus, it offers a free and two reasonable paid plans, which makes it a no-brainer for most teams.

Primarily replacing the use of emails to escape lengthy Email conversations, Slack helps teams discuss (and in some cases, create) tasks and projects, make voice and video calls, create groups, and add attendees as required.