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I know this question might sound stupid to many, but - in terms of rigorous IEEE definitions - can we say that GitHub allows some kind of Software Life Cycle or some management paradigm in particular?

For example, can the Issues section look Agile somehow? Or how would you define its structure in terms of Software Engineering?

Thanks to everybody

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Github is a tool which can be used as part of agile software development, but it can be used as part of non-agile software development as well.

What version control tool you use is completely orthogonal to your development process. Perhaps some software development tools might be more suitable for certain agile processes than others. But "We use [software] therefore we are agile" is a fallacy usually believed by people who heard that agile is great but didn't really understand what agile actually means.

Agile is about how you plan and execute your project and how the people involved in the project communicate with each other. It has nothing to do with what software tools they use.

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  • And the fact that it has Discussions, Issues etc, makes GitHub issue-oriented somehow? Or it always depends on how you use it, again?
    – dvlp_icn
    Jan 27, 2022 at 17:16
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    @dvlp_icn Nothing about these features is inherently "agile", nor is anything about them inherently "anti-agile". Software isn't agile. Teams are agile.
    – Philipp
    Jan 27, 2022 at 17:23
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    I have come to conclusion that anything which has a checklist for being Agile, is inherently not Agile. When a Team rapidly adapts to changes in an organic manner, that's Agile. Simple as that.
    – Jörg W Mittag
    Jan 27, 2022 at 19:38
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    @dvlp_icn - also, you've wrote "in terms of rigorous IEEE definitions" - I'm not sure what you're after there. If there is such a definition of Agile, it's not of general relevance (but might, say, be a working definition within a scope of some paper). IEEE is not an authority that can define or standardize Agile. Or even Software Engineering. There are some notable definitions of SE out there (IEEEs being one of them), but there isn't an authoritative formal one that's widely accepted as the definition.
    – Filip Milovanović
    Jan 27, 2022 at 21:04
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    @FilipMilovanović: And it should go without saying that "rigorous" is pretty much the opposite of "agile".
    – Jörg W Mittag
    Jan 27, 2022 at 21:21

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