I’m a gardener. It’s in my blood I think, something that goes back to both my grandparents who had gardens. My mom has beautiful roses in her backyard. People in my family garden. Like most pursuits, gardening gives back what you put in, oftentimes in multiples as long as the input is over a certain threshold. If you put in the absolute minimum, you can still receive great paybacks as long as you choose plants and flowers that are OK with little help in surviving. If you’re like me, you can greatly increase what you get back out of your garden by constantly improving the process, finding new ways to increase efficiency or productivity, tinkering with results, etc. Regardless of what kind of gardener you are, as long as you don’t give up, your gardens will typically survive.
However, if you stop doing the bare minimum, you will no longer receive any results at all, at least as it relates to producing flowers or vegetables. If you give up or reduce your effort below a threshold necessary to achieve a standoff with nature, nature will quickly take over and your carefully cultivated gardens will return to their natural state, one of abandon and disarray. There may still be rare successes but they are random and always under attack from weeds, drought and pests. A rose left at a country house long abandoned may continue to bloom for many years but the plant will constantly be surrounded by weeds and pests.
Software projects are not unlike gardens in this regard. Different types of projects require different levels of attention but they all must have a leader of some sort. There is often talk of self-organizing teams that turn out solid results but these teams were typically either brought together by a leader who remains engaged in some way or are comprised of individuals who express leadership in different ways within the group. If a software project does not have a leader or the leader is distracted from the needs of the project and team, the project will begin to deteriorate. Almost immediately, the entropy of nature will set in. Weeds begin to sprout up. Edges begin to deteriorate. The structure of the project erodes and dirt seeps out of the cracks. Without leadership, no project can stand up to the force of natural entropy. Once that entropy takes over, it takes an inordinate amount of work just to get the project back to a functioning state.
This is an aspect of all methodologies, but specifically Agile (big A), that is often overlooked and undersold, that of strong leadership. The literature often talks about the team, self-organizing, Gestaltic, productive. But no team survives that way without leadership though the leadership can come from within the team instead of the typical all-knowing leader. Someone (singular seems preferable though I know of teams that have 4 leaders and 1 team member that work reasonably well) has to turn on the sprinklers, pull the weeds, mulch the ground, apply small dosages of fertilizer so that the team can become more than the sum of its parts. Without that strength of will and character, the team will almost always devolve over time into an incoherent mass of movement, undirected and inefficient.