Agility Not Agile Development

Fri, 18 Apr 2014 14:29:14 +0000

Dave Thomas has a really excellent post about how it's time to kill Agile. It's a very well thought out post and it embodies a lot of my concerns with the movement. I have a few insights to add to his perspective.

I was a software engineer consultant for over five years. The Java and open-source community had adopted Agile and implementations like Scrum and XP fairly quickly. It made us find the way to get software that was good out the door in a timely fashion. It made us not sit on our asses collecting requirements for months before any real work was done. I worked on a very successful search project at a Fortune 500 company following Agile methods loosely based on Scrum. I still believe to this day the level of success was due to the project being in "skunkworks" and therefore having a simplified budget and leaving us in control of the moving parts. Once that project got into a normal budgeting process, innovation floundered.

Scrum on The Dangling Pointer

Agility Not Agile Development