I just off the phone with an old High School chum. We got to talking about Bottom-Up Thinking as a way to set direction when a situation is unclear or changing too quickly. It was in the context of career, so I gave a lot of unsolicited advice … ‘natch.
I think groups going Agile need the one sheet Principles Behind The Agile Manifesto. Short and clear, it has a good chance of galvanizing change. In true contrarian manner though, I’d like to point out why blindly following these principles is a bad idea.
A common definition of insanity is “to do the same thing again and again, expecting different results”. Yup, human denial: a common enough survival skill for the social animal in all of us, can lead to failure. It often does. To hear the nerd pundits speak, “retrospectives” are the continuous improvement part of today’s Agile methodologies (like Scrum or XP) meant to head off repetitive team failure (group insanity, I guess).
The truth is retrospectives are postmortems. Whether you call them code reviews, retrospectives or love-ins, the work is now dead. There is no more time, or money, or energy or fresh ideas to work on. We are just picking over its bones. I think people dress up these events with nice names to avoid the connotation, and continuous problem, of postmortems turning into group slugfests. Fair enough. Anything to keep the team from killing each other…
A steady drumbeat has started to find the successor to “Agility”, a now somewhat aging fad in software development circles. My current prediction is that today’s “Agility” will become tomorrow’s “Simplicity”. I may be wrong, but even if I am, there is an underlying aesthetic to both Agility and Simplicity that will never go away. And that is a good thing.
Previously I’ve written about the inherent non-determinacy in Design. While I covered some of the useless and useful metrics organizations can gauge their design progress with, that doesn’t help anyone start and finish a great design project. The way to do design well is with prototypes, agile tools/techniques and usability testing.
One of the latest fads in programming is Agile Software Development. Most fads, after a while, take on a disturbing quality as the bandwagon swells to the teetering point. We’ve gotten to that disturbing evolutionary point with Agile Programming. Talks and material from Linda Rising are the clearest indicators I’ve seen that Agile Programming’s days as a fad are numbered.