Agile vs. SNAFU
Venkat’s talk as not started yet, and the keynote questions are droning on. I’m attending the talk because for as much noise as Agile has made there has not been a proportionate level of either criticism or adoption. Instead my perception of what is happening is that most shops (> 50 percent) are happily chugging along ignoring pain points and doing business as usual. Perhaps this is because the current mode of operation is good enough, though others suggest that these people just don’t “get it”. I think that its just in peoples nature to resist change. At the very least I think that people should try, fail, figure out if they did everything as prescribed, if they did perhaps its not for them, and if not, try again. I’m hoping to get more ideas from this talk about how to position Agile to people who have not yet decided to investigate the alleged benefits of shortened transparent continuous feedback cycles. For all the arm waving that has been going on with regard to Agile I think there is room for a bit of pragmatism. In a way agile methodologies are too complex and can be simmered to a few principles, in my opinion. The engineering practices that arise from these principles however sound deceptively simple when presented in a nice powerpoint, but are in truth quite complicated to implement given the huge amount of variance in politics and skills present in teams. Anecdotal evidence for this is that there were 60 people at a Test Driven Development talk I listened in on yesterday, for a concept that people have had years of time to investigate, experiment, and try out (not that it will work for everyone, but that if they had they wouldn’t be in an intro to TDD talk). I was surprised that the talk was even scheduled, and didn’t expect that much interest. It goes to show that these topics are still being chewed on in the great master of the development community, and that most have not yet decided wether to swallow the concepts, or violently puke. Situation Normal …