Agile Was Neither Born Nor Dead

The term ‘Agile’ is derived from the Latin word agere, meaning "to act," and agilis, meaning "able to move quickly and easily." Source: Oxford Languages

Let me tell you a story. I spent most of my childhood in two villages near Tumkur and Bangalore. About 30-35 years back, the villages had no TV. Hardly one or two homes would have a TV. The only source of entertainment for people was some initiative in villages. One such initiative is to learn a play from Indian epics like Ramayana and stage it with borrowed costumes for a festival in the village.

One such event happened in November 1985. The villagers decided to learn Ramayan, one of the Indian epics.

The plan

The villagers decided that the Ugadi, Kannada New Year, was a good occasion to hold such an event. First, the event date and budget were fixed. Someone knew how much a drama set would cost. I clearly don't remember; it could be about Rs. 40K. They decided each member would contribute towards the budget. Learning and staging the play was complex work, as most of the members were illiterates and couldn't read and remember the dialogues. They needed to figure out what to learn and how to do it. 

The Team

They hired a domain expert. He was called the Masterji, and he came with a harmonium. Here is how they decided on roles: A tall and handsome person would become Ram, a lean and fair person would become Sita, a person with a big mustache would play the role of Ravan, and so on.

Let's call these folks Artists. There was also one person who would help these people run the show by getting all the support they needed.

Execution

They decided to practice at the temple from 9 pm to 12 am. The master would teach them Ramayan chapter by chapter. He would often teach them simple and short dialogues covering the end-to-end story and later introduce complex dialogues. This was called a Rehearsal. 

Did they continuously rehearse every day until Ugadi (Delivery Day)? 

No, but they were doing something naturally human.

Continuous Reviews and Feedback Loop

Once a month, they would hold demonstrations of whatever they have learned for the villagers (Real End Users). The artists used to be very excited about these events as they got to gauge their performance in 

front of a real audience. During this event, if some artists struggle to enact the play, the masterji will make a note to run that part of the play through the rehearsal again. 

The masterji would also observe whether the audience is enjoying the play. If they aren't enjoying, he would make a point to add a few fun elements in between, which will be learned in the next set of practice sessions. 

The output of these events used to be: 

• Chapters that need to be further rehearsed by artists.

• Additional fun elements to be added to make the play more fun for the audience.

• Sometimes, a few action items, like spending a few hours extra to learn some complex chapter or hiring a professional artist for some role when villagers can't pull off.

The Release

Did they stick to the final date to stage the play? 

Yes, because the day used to be a special day that only comes once a year. Every time they started an initiative like this, they used to stick to the date but play with the scope of work and do what served the purpose. 

In this case, they used to rent a grand drama set and successfully stage the play. The play used to start at 10 pm and go on until 6 am the next day. The neighboring villagers and relatives from the far-off villages, towns, and cities would visit the village for this event. This was one heck of a carnival for the villagers. There were cases when they would drop the idea of stage play altogether when they realized it wasn't going in the right direction.

This was a time when Scrum wasn’t even born, and the Manifesto for Agile software development wasn’t written. The villagers were using their collective wisdom to empirically achieve their goals. So Agility is a human nature. Human beings are born with empiricism. 

Hence, Agile was neither born nor dead. It's a human trait. It's the ability to evolve our work (products or services) based on feedback(from the market, users, etc). It's a choice that lies with us.