Agile is like a perfect example of a lot of things. Publishing a "manifesto" makes the revolution analogy on-the-nose. Dissident manifestos tend to share a the

Agile is like a perfect example of a lot of things. Publishing a "manifesto" makes the revolution analogy on-the-nose. Dissident manifestos tend to share a the same failure point. They're heavy on critique of the system that they want to overthrow, hand-wavy on the system that they want to enact. The Communist Manifesto, to pick on the obvious example, is mostly about capitalism, other (wrong) versions of socialism.. notably reactionary socialism. It's also about the struggle to bring about revolution. There's surprisingly few paragraphs about what communism will do differently, once the revolution takes place. Liberal revolutionary manifestos was similar, with French and american revolutionaries settling (or not) on a system of government only after overthrowing monarchy. The agile manifesto does outline a lot of how agile works, but the most compelling part was its description of "waterfall" and all its ills. Liberalism and communism, in their idyllic literature, never really contended with the fact that these were alternative methods of "ruling over a population." Agile never contented with Agile was as a people management system. Well... Agile is a way of telling developers what to do. It is a people management system. Where its completely unlike the political analogy is that agile was derived from working systems. It wasn't just an idealization. Ironically though, it ends up in the same place. What worked well for particular teams became the ideals. I think the ultimate stinker though, was the "political economy" of agile. A company where everything works great isn't going to tear out their process and bring in consultants to implement a new management system. It's companies that are failing to produce software well that do this.