I Hate the Agile Manifesto

http://www.whattofix.com/blog/archives/2008/08/okay_i_hate_the.php

by DanielBMarkham • 18 years ago

7 7 18 years ago

ajross2• 18 years ago

Honestly, I think this is exactly backwards. The voodoo juice in "agile" comes from the mindset, and not the specific practices. The mindset is encapsulated pretty well by the manifesto, IMHO. Could someone write a better one? Maybe.

But if you want to know what agile is all about, read the manifesto. Decades of experience in XP, *DD, AUP, etc... isn't going to teach you much about the "why" of those paradigms. If I were an agile proponent (and I'm really not) interviewing a candidate, I'd want to know that they can explain the handful of ideas in the manifesto. Process stuff is something any monkey can implement.

DanielBMarkham3• 18 years ago

Whoa horsey. Nobody is arguing specific practices here. I'm arguing that feel-good marketing bleck doesn't make a project run. In fact, it confuses more than it helps.

Want a good checklist of what agile is? Try http://www.whattofix.com/blog/archives/2008/04/the_agile_che...

Or:

    * Adapt - Always ask yourself what is wrong and what you need to do to fix it. If you continuously communicate to identify problems and fix them, I believe that in a normal world you will do the following things that I can observe:

    * Time-Box - You have a fixed, immutable time-box in which you deliver tested changes (either code, documents, processes, beans, whatever) that be demonstrated

    * Togetherness - The closer everybody is, the better. Co-located, non-cubicle, non-office spaces are best. Highly matrixed, separated teams are worst.

    * Value - You have a clear way of determining the most valueable thing to do each iteration. Business Owners give you business value. Technical Owners give you architectural value.

    * Ownership - The team, and only the team, owns its estimates. Outside factors are considered and can be communicated, but at the end of the day the team has the power to determine the amount and type of work it can take on for each iteration.

    * Forecast - Being agile and empirical does not preclude precictability or forecasting. In fact, the value of agile teams is their ability to take highly-changing environments and put some kind of predictable forecastable order in them.

ajross2• 18 years ago

Horsey?

I don't much disagree with any of that. I might quibble with a few things (I'm not sure that "forecast" is really a central theme in most schemes, lots of very successful, nominatively "agile" development gets by without much of a timetable), but that's not particularly at issue. Your list looks good to me.

But it also looks like a manifesto. And that's fine. So maybe your point is that you like your manifesto better than the official one? I like the poetry of the original better, but yours seems good too.

But I don't understand the idea of "feel-good marketing bleck". The points of the original look awfully profound to me. I think you're being too hard on it here. If you like concrete guidelines more than statements of purpose, feel free. Just don't throw tomatoes at those of us who prefer the poetry.

I Hate the Agile Manifesto

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