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I think many aspects of Agile are sensible enough in most situations. My negative experience with Agile has mainly been through people who are ideological abou
by recursivedoubts 5y ago
I think many aspects of Agile are sensible enough in most situations.
My negative experience with Agile has mainly been through people who are ideological about it and insist, when agile fails, that it was not the fault of the process or some other factor, but rather the fault of the people who "didn't implement agile right."
A bit of humility from the Agile community would be very welcome, as well as clarification of what types of problems it works well for and which ones it doesn't, where the dangers are, etc.
- jdlshore 5y agoI can't grant you humility from the Agile community, or even necessarily from myself, but I can clarify what problems it works well for and doesn't, dangers, etc. Agile works well when organizational leaders are willing to invest in changing the constraints of their organization, and team members are similarly willing to work to customize the philosophy—'cause that's all it is, a way of thinking about software development—to their specific situation. Given those two things, I've yet to find a type of software development where Agile didn't work. People have used its ideas for web development, embedded systems development, back-end, front-end, Java, C++, JavaScript, etc. etc. But those two things can be really really hard, which is why I think cargo-cult Agile is so common. And trying to be Agile without them is dangerous, in that it can easily be worse than whatever it replaced. I talk about them more in chapters 4 and 5 of the book. You can find an excerpt of chapter 4, including a list of the investments needed, here: https://www.jamesshore.com/v2/books/aoad2/invest_in_agility https://www.jamesshore.com/v2/books/aoad2/invest_in_agility