Monday, May 01, 2006
The Biggest Lies told by the Agile Community!
If you ever happen to run across a practitioner of agile methods such as SCRUM, XP, Crystal, DSDM or any of the others and ask them for a reference, you will be steering them into one of the biggest lies ever told...
Have you ever noticed that pretty much all of the small insultancies who profess agile methods never seem to be able to produce tons of references? Ever wonder why? I really don't hope that folks aren't believing the hype in that many enterprises consider agile to be competitive advantage?
The truth of the matter is actually much simplier. Reality states, that CIOs don't really care about being agile. They do however care about hitting budgets and delivering quality software. If you can stay within your budget, deliver quality software and do it agile or waterfall it doesn't matter to them (Yes, this is an overstatement for other bloggers who are only capable of attacking and not participating in an open dialog to feed on). Usually agilists within the community especially those who work for small consultancies tend to be better than average developers so quality is increased not by methodology but by competency of the individual.
Another tale often told is that case studies don't exist because they won't allow the consulting firms to "write it up". Maybe enterprises, don't want to "write it up" not because it is competitive advantage (not really) but because there is simply no benefit to them in doing so.
The one thing that I have found to hold true is that folks in large enterprises on average don't like to write but they do like to speak? I wonder why the agile community hasn't reached out and invited folks that are fulltime employees of Fortune enterprises to talk at conferences?
We all know that face-to-face conversations are the best way to start a dialog yet the way agile conferences work is by removing conversation and proxying it through comprehensive documentation (aka call for papers).
It would be interesting to find out after all, that the enterprisey folks were more agile than the agilists after all...
| | View blog reactionsHave you ever noticed that pretty much all of the small insultancies who profess agile methods never seem to be able to produce tons of references? Ever wonder why? I really don't hope that folks aren't believing the hype in that many enterprises consider agile to be competitive advantage?
The truth of the matter is actually much simplier. Reality states, that CIOs don't really care about being agile. They do however care about hitting budgets and delivering quality software. If you can stay within your budget, deliver quality software and do it agile or waterfall it doesn't matter to them (Yes, this is an overstatement for other bloggers who are only capable of attacking and not participating in an open dialog to feed on). Usually agilists within the community especially those who work for small consultancies tend to be better than average developers so quality is increased not by methodology but by competency of the individual.
Another tale often told is that case studies don't exist because they won't allow the consulting firms to "write it up". Maybe enterprises, don't want to "write it up" not because it is competitive advantage (not really) but because there is simply no benefit to them in doing so.
The one thing that I have found to hold true is that folks in large enterprises on average don't like to write but they do like to speak? I wonder why the agile community hasn't reached out and invited folks that are fulltime employees of Fortune enterprises to talk at conferences?
We all know that face-to-face conversations are the best way to start a dialog yet the way agile conferences work is by removing conversation and proxying it through comprehensive documentation (aka call for papers).
It would be interesting to find out after all, that the enterprisey folks were more agile than the agilists after all...
