Agile Crazile

A friend and colleague recently blogged about his displeasure with Agile so far: Agile Crazile.

What I liked about his post is that he hasn't totally given up on Agile (the way most Agile rebuttals are).

Here's my attempt to respond to his concerns (his words are in italics)... I hope I don't get to preachy:

"Blasphemy! You would say."

Naaaaah.

"... the whole software world treats agile methodologies as a panacea to all its problems."

And it's not completely wrong at that if you understand what Agile is and is not. Agile does provide suggestions that address a lot of problems while not imposing many strict do's and don't's, always emphasizing that each project is unique and requires a method tailored to it. So basically Agile itself claims that there is no universal panacea... and hence accepting that very claim of Agile acts like panacea... am I making sense??

"Most of the material out there that has been written by very gifted writers which ends up seducing everybody to espouse it but I think most of it is bit pedantic and lacks pragmatism."

I humbly disagree. The writers are definitely gifted but they do not live and breathe solely in universities or conferences. Many of them still build software and manage real-life projects. Examples: Brian Marick, Scott Ambler, Jim Highsmith, Mike Beedle.

Dave Thomas is actually known for writing a well-accepted book on Pragmatic Programming.

These guys also defend and expand their views on online forums and groups like agile-testing, agileprojectmanagement, etc.

Tags: technology:agile Last modified 02:37 Fri, 20 Jul 2007 by AmanKing. Accessed 749 times Children What Links Here Share Except where expressly noted, this work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.