4 ms·

Required reading: “We tried Baseball and it didn’t work.” http://xprogramming.com/articles/jatbaseball/ http://xprogramming.com/articles/jatbaseball/

abstractbill 15y ago
That's a really bad analogy. People can, and do, play cut-down versions of baseball all the time (in Britain we call this kind of game "rounders". It has very flexible rules, and yet I've never seen it "not work").
- raganwald 15y ago
  I’ve played rounders in Nigeria. But it isn’t a cut-down version of Baseball, it’s its own game :-) As far as the analogy is concerned, I don’t see it suggesting that you can’t cut Baseball or Agile or anything else down. For example, XP started as a bunch of practices cut down to what its proponents felt were the essentials! What I personally read in the story is that if you are given something new, you have to embrace it for what it is and learn to do thing sits way if you want to benefit from it. If you fight against it at every turn because it feels different or awkward, you are going to end up neutering it, and it will not be a surprise that it doesn’t deliver what you hoped. I have experienced the exact same thing with programming languages. If you try to write Java programs in Clojure, you will walk away very unsatisfied with the result.
herge 15y ago
I always have the impression that Agile is sort of like the True Scotsman or the Communist Manifesto "If it didn't work, it's because it isn't really agile."
- raganwald 15y ago
  Absolutely this is the case. But not to single Agile out unfairly: Although people are doing a lot of great work researching processes and so on, Software Development as an industry is like this. Consider Waterfall. If you try it, and it doesn’t work, proponents will tell you that you were doing it wrong with all the changes late in a project. If you try Ruby and your code is a mess, Ruby programmers will say it isn’t the language, you failed to write good Ruby code. And so on, ad infinitum. So, if I agree with you, why did I post this? Not because I assert that Agile will “work” if you just do it right, but that I think it’s wrong to modify it and then blame it for not working. Come to think of it, if you do it “right” and then succeed, I also think it’s wrong to give it the credit. But that’s another story.

abstractbill 15y ago

That's a really bad analogy. People can, and do, play cut-down versions of baseball all the time (in Britain we call this kind of game "rounders". It has very flexible rules, and yet I've never seen it "not work").

raganwald 15y ago
I’ve played rounders in Nigeria. But it isn’t a cut-down version of Baseball, it’s its own game :-) As far as the analogy is concerned, I don’t see it suggesting that you can’t cut Baseball or Agile or anything else down. For example, XP started as a bunch of practices cut down to what its proponents felt were the essentials! What I personally read in the story is that if you are given something new, you have to embrace it for what it is and learn to do thing sits way if you want to benefit from it. If you fight against it at every turn because it feels different or awkward, you are going to end up neutering it, and it will not be a surprise that it doesn’t deliver what you hoped. I have experienced the exact same thing with programming languages. If you try to write Java programs in Clojure, you will walk away very unsatisfied with the result.

herge 15y ago

I always have the impression that Agile is sort of like the True Scotsman or the Communist Manifesto "If it didn't work, it's because it isn't really agile."

raganwald 15y ago
Absolutely this is the case. But not to single Agile out unfairly: Although people are doing a lot of great work researching processes and so on, Software Development as an industry is like this. Consider Waterfall. If you try it, and it doesn’t work, proponents will tell you that you were doing it wrong with all the changes late in a project. If you try Ruby and your code is a mess, Ruby programmers will say it isn’t the language, you failed to write good Ruby code. And so on, ad infinitum. So, if I agree with you, why did I post this? Not because I assert that Agile will “work” if you just do it right, but that I think it’s wrong to modify it and then blame it for not working. Come to think of it, if you do it “right” and then succeed, I also think it’s wrong to give it the credit. But that’s another story.