I usually vote up Agile attacks, because I love to hear developers talk about the difference between good and bad Agile.
But it's getting a little old. It seems the world is full of cranky, half-informed folks who get a little coffee in them and suddenly are ready to make grand pronouncements about the entire state of things (Love the self-recursion here)
Seriously, one last time. Agile is best practices around iterative and incremental development. It's not a standard, it's a marketing term. Because it's not a standard, criticizing it is like criticizing "good ice cream". What's good ice cream? Any damn thing you'd like it to be. Perhaps the author has a larger criticism of how stupid we all can be when implementing change. If so, get in line. There are a lot of us.
Scrum is a standard, and it's not changing anytime soon. You can call that a good or bad thing, but it's a very small subset of Agile, so it sounds more like a separate topic to me than the entire world of Agile.
I hate the way we implement change in technology organizations. Part of the problem we have, unfortunately, is that everybody feels themselves an expert on stuff they read about in a book and maybe saw it done badly a couple of times.
The more I think about this article, the more I feel like it's 95% marketing and 5% fluff. Apologies to the author if they are serious, but something is a bit off here. Not worth flagging by any means, but I'm not upvoting it.
ADD: Bit of a meta-note. Just this morning I wrote a story on some ideas about how to handle Subject Matter Experts in Agile teams. (shameless plug: http://www.whattofix.com/blog/archives/2012/08/who-moved-my-... ) The use of the word "Agile" in my article was very useful: it identified the topic as best practices around SMEs in iterative and incremental work. It is a dry topic, and I didn't claim to have all the answers, and it was more narrowly-targeted, so it didn't get a lot of traction. That's understandable.
But what I see happen over and over again is that wild hand-waving criticisms get a lot of traction on place like this because they can emotionally engage a larger audience. Practical targeted stuff? Not so much. So for the average developer who's just out of school and never has worked on an Agile team? I'm not sure they're receiving a very balanced look at things if all they read are from places where things are voted up or down based on emotional impact. It's another interesting and counter-intuitive side-effect of the voting/ranking system.
Agile is best practices around iterative and incremental development. It's not a standard, it's a marketing term. Because it's not a standard, criticizing it is like criticizing "good ice cream". What's good ice cream? Any damn thing you'd like it to be.
Excellent analogy. If best practices and incremental development are like good ice cream, then Agile is like Tasti D-Lite™. What's not to like?
Unless you go to a molecular gastronomy restaurant where they are as likely to serve you good ice cream in the form of a cookie or a cookie in the form of good ice cream.
But yeah I see what you mean and in general agree with you.
The author seems surprised that a meet-up about development process and methodologies is mostly older, experienced devs rather than young hipsters. It doesn't take a genius to figure that one out.
Agile attacks are almost always clueless, ill-informed and incoherent rants such as this one.
There's a lot of valid and interesting criticism of particular Agile methodologies and practices, but full frontal attacks on Agile in general are usually just malicious link-bait such as this one.
But it's getting a little old. It seems the world is full of cranky, half-informed folks who get a little coffee in them and suddenly are ready to make grand pronouncements about the entire state of things (Love the self-recursion here)
Seriously, one last time. Agile is best practices around iterative and incremental development. It's not a standard, it's a marketing term. Because it's not a standard, criticizing it is like criticizing "good ice cream". What's good ice cream? Any damn thing you'd like it to be. Perhaps the author has a larger criticism of how stupid we all can be when implementing change. If so, get in line. There are a lot of us.
Scrum is a standard, and it's not changing anytime soon. You can call that a good or bad thing, but it's a very small subset of Agile, so it sounds more like a separate topic to me than the entire world of Agile.
I hate the way we implement change in technology organizations. Part of the problem we have, unfortunately, is that everybody feels themselves an expert on stuff they read about in a book and maybe saw it done badly a couple of times.
The more I think about this article, the more I feel like it's 95% marketing and 5% fluff. Apologies to the author if they are serious, but something is a bit off here. Not worth flagging by any means, but I'm not upvoting it.
ADD: Bit of a meta-note. Just this morning I wrote a story on some ideas about how to handle Subject Matter Experts in Agile teams. (shameless plug: http://www.whattofix.com/blog/archives/2012/08/who-moved-my-... ) The use of the word "Agile" in my article was very useful: it identified the topic as best practices around SMEs in iterative and incremental work. It is a dry topic, and I didn't claim to have all the answers, and it was more narrowly-targeted, so it didn't get a lot of traction. That's understandable.
But what I see happen over and over again is that wild hand-waving criticisms get a lot of traction on place like this because they can emotionally engage a larger audience. Practical targeted stuff? Not so much. So for the average developer who's just out of school and never has worked on an Agile team? I'm not sure they're receiving a very balanced look at things if all they read are from places where things are voted up or down based on emotional impact. It's another interesting and counter-intuitive side-effect of the voting/ranking system.