Agile “What if”s

Stick around long enough in the nerd space, and you may come across the list of programming languages described as “what if”, i.e. “Java – What if everything was an object”. Maybe it’s the end of the year reflection period we find ourselves in, maybe it’s my brain working through food coma, but I can’t stop applying the general idea to some things in the Agile space right now, and have to get them down. I’m pretty sure, I crossed that idea at someplace else in the past few months, so here’s my take on the Agile “what if”s.

Disclaimer: This is going to be a list of totally unfair summaries – oftentimes underinformed ones. It’s intended as fun and taken with a grain of salt. If you feel offended by any of my descriptions, work on your humor, not this blog entry’s comment functionality.

Scrum: What if everything we worked on is a product?
Kanban: What if everything we worked on is to provide a service?
Extreme Programming: What if programmers were able to ship working products as often as possible?
Software Craftsmanship: What if we really invested in the education of our programmers?

Test-driven Development: What if everything we do can be motivated by a failing test?
Acceptance Test-driven Development: What if every feature is expressed with automatable tests?
Behavior-driven Development: What if we express our tests in a fluent language?
Agile Testing: What if every problem can be solved with a Whole Team approach?
Context-driven Testing: What if all testing we do is exploratory?

Event-sourcing: What if everything in our business domain happens on events?
CQRS: What if we optimize writing data and reading independently from each other?

DevOps: What if cross-functional includes our operations?

Kanban Flight Levels: What if every scaling problem can be solved on a higher level Kanban board?
Scrum @ Scale: What if every scaling problem can be solved by fractals?
Disciplined Agile Delivery: What if agile was an IBM process description?
Scaled Agile Framework:
– What if we throw everything associated with Agile together into one thing?
– What if all problems can be solved with a release train?
Nexus: What if every problem can be solved with a Nexus Integration Team?
Large-scale Scrum:
– What if every problem can be solved with feature teams?
– What if we take autonomous, cross-functional, self-managing teams to the extreme?

Lean Change Management: What if we change our organization iteratively and incrementally?

Agile Fluency: What if familiarizing with Agile is like learning a new language?

Human System Dynamics: What if our organization consists just of containers and interactions?
Sociocracy: What if our organization consists just of circles and roles?
Holacracy: What if our organization is run democratically?
Beta Kodex: What if all our problems stem from F.W. Taylor?

Systems Thinking: What if the world consists of multiple systems?
Complexity Thinking: What if the world is more complex than just systems of systems?

Co-active Coaching: What if we coach with the energy of the coachee?
Systemic Coaching: What if we make coachees aware of their surrounding systems?
ORSC: What if we fix all relationships around us?

Did I miss out anything? Feel free to add yours in the comments.