Re: What would you call this type of Agile?

On Thu, Nov 12, 2009 at 3:20 PM, Ged Byrne <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>
> Hi Gregg,
> Is it inevitable, then, that Agile will become discredited by all those who claim Agility when all they have is Anarchy?
> That is rather depressing.

Discredited to whom? It's not going to discredit Agile in the eyes of
anyone who has ever participated in a successful Agile project. And
it's not going to discredit it in the eyes of those who suffer in
dysfunctional Waterfall or anarchy environments, who dream of the
promise of Agile.

The Agile movement has been pretty well formalized for nearly ten
years now - both The Pragmatic Programmer and Extreme Programming
Explained were published in 2000. Scrum and other methods aren't much
younger. Many, many projects have been done using Agile methods with
varying degrees of formality, some successful, some not. Thousands of
programmers have years of experience with Agile today. There is no
reason whatsoever to treat it as "new" or "controversial". If Agile
was going to be broadly discredited, it would have happened a good
five years ago, with the general failure of a vast majority of Agile
projects.

So what we're seeing today isn't about discrediting. It's simply
preprogrammed political responses, and (mostly anecdotal) stories of
success or failure attributed to Agile (or Waterfall) exist mostly to
reinforce the belief system of the teller and/or the listener.

Reaction to Agile appears in a variety of patterns now...

* Developers calling their sloppy, careless, unsystematic development
processes "Agile" in order to pretend they're addressing ongoing
problems caused by carelessness
* Managers/business reacting negatively to Agile projects because any
functioning Agile method provides checks against unreasonable demands
* Managers/business reacting negatively to anarchist teams that call
themselves "Agile" so they don't have to discipline themselves
* Developers on dysfunctional waterfall/anarchy projects who see Agile
as a way to escape their frustrating environment
* Developers on long-running successful (or increasingly unsuccessful)
projects that fear change

I'm sure we could come up with more. But the point is, undisciplined
anarchist teams calling themselves "Agile" is a typical
social/political reaction to outside pressure from unsatisfied
customers. It's an excuse. There's nothing legitimate Agile developers
can do to stop this. And there's nothing we can to do stop people who
are predisposed to disliking Agile from using these bad teams as bad
examples.

You know what works? Success. Don't worry about what the corncobs
think. Just do a good job with a good team, be Agile and Pragmatic,
and deliver results. Every successful Agile project does more to
defeat the naysayers than every thread on some mailing list, looking
for people who agree with you in the first place.

--
-dave

"Why doesn't the Earth fall?  How can you walk upon it?  It's the
music.  It's the music of the Earth, and the Sun, and the Stars.  It's
the music of yourself, vibrating.  Yes, you are music too! You're all
instruments.  Everyone is supposed to be playing their part in this
vast Arkestra of the Cosmos."

-Sun Ra

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