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Stop Agilizing Everything

November 5, 2011 | Author: PM Hut | Filed under: Agile Project Management

Stop Agilizing Everything
By Christopher R. Goldsbury

Introduction

Agile universities, certifications, agile consulting, traveling coaches, planning poker card sets, agile software products, agile modeling, agile arm bands, countless agile books and the crazed cycle of agile conferences.

Huh?

The buzz cycle is in overdrive and it’s electrocuted the business world with the promise of faster, better and cheaper. This article is a plea to stop. Stop all the hype, the opportunistic profiting, and the marketing.

Good Intentions Turned Ugly

What started out as a challenge to the software development community to think outside the box ( invent, create ), abandon a one size fits all model to approaching software development and execute your projects in a pragmatic fashion that takes account of the context you’re working in….has turned into a marketing machine of horrible dimensions.

There was a time when people talked agile and you knew they were on the vanguard; trying to solve the real problems. They cared. They were passionate, deliberate, and informed. Now, when you hear a colleague professing agile…they’re most likely drinking the kool-aid poured by the snake-oil agile coach from Denver or San Fran. The formulaic response to the core problems is all too familiar and draining:

  • Poor Requirements – You need user stories and iterations.
  • Defects in Software – Continuous integration and TDD will solve that.
  • Bad estimation – Use planning poker. It always works.
  • Change Management – Break it up into iterations and embrace the changes given in iteration reviews.

I’m not knocking these techniques. Many are novel inventions that do have their place in SD/AD. But instead of being offered as potential options, patterns, techniques to solving a problem among many other potential solutions; they have become a sales pitch by the opportunist preying on desperate CIOs. Buyer beware. Bubbles pop and my gut says the needle to prick this balloon is getting very sharp and close.

Let’s stop agilizing everything. Good ideas, tools, and techniques don’t need the world ‘agile’ pre or post fixed to be worthwhile.

Come Back Home

So turn off the scrum-o-matic. Wipe the agile makeup from your face, and put the kanban sequin dress away. There are still problems to solve. We haven’t unraveled this thing called software development. It’s devilishly vexing and we need good minds focused on it. Become neo-software-amish, come back home to the forest of software trolls and invent/create again.

Christopher R. Goldsbury is fluent in Agile and traditional software development methodologies, including waterfall and iterative life-cycles. Chris seeks to help organizations map a development strategy that blends different approaches and seeks the greatest value for their investment. Also, Chris is available for speaking engagements and training seminars. He can speak at your software development conference or user group for public engagements. He can also speak and train at private engagements for your company or department.

You can read more from Chris on his blog.

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This entry was posted on Saturday, November 5th, 2011 and is filed under Agile Project Management. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

2 people have left comments

Your blog got me thinking so a bit of a different perspective on your blog at http://blog.alvazan.com/127/the-marketing-engine-of-agile/

Dean Hiller wrote on November 10, 2011 - 10:48 pm | Visit Link

Agile has been great for us. We have added development practices that were lacking and now that the dev teams can focus on development we have come to the realization that the product teams are struggling. We can now make the product, but the product is ill defined. Where before the development teams were seen as the thing slowing the org down, not it is the lack of good product definition. Of figuring out a road map, of planning…

Without our current implementation of agile methodologies a lot of the troubles would have not come to the surface. Agile forces everyone to communicate and where that communication is bad to FIX IT. Agile is not just a development methodology when the projects get larger and the org grows it is a way of thinking about everything we do and a way to bring problems to the forefront to then solve creatively.

John wrote on January 23, 2012 - 11:47 am | Visit Link

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