The democrats and republicans are doing a fine job of "fire bombing" the centrists in both their parties (I grabbed that quote from an article "It's not easy being George" in this months Vanity Fair). And, as I scan the agile groups and blogosphere, it seems the methodologists are doing it as well. Some of us take the "extreme" in extreme programming too literally, and others are holding on to some of agile developments long disproved stigma for far too long.
My approach always has been (and hopefully always will be, unless of course I turn out like my father, which all of us eventually do...) a pragmatic one. There are many things I love about Scrum and agile - driving elaboration and development off the backlog, test-driven development, burndown charts, and much more. And there are a some that I could do without (self-organizing teams, developers and testers are interchangeable,... I blog on these later).
An agile approach needs to be tailored to your people, process and technology. You can start-off "by the book" but be sure to incrementally adjust your process in the same way you incrementally modify your products under development. If you have a particularly gnarly architectural component to build feel free to build a UML-based design first. It’s okay. Really! These are just items that are added to the sprint backlog and monitored along side all of the other demand that flows through the process. And god forbid you build a Gantt chart to model out some complex project dependencies. How will you be able to look yourself in the mirror?
Come on now; let’s be agile about agile and use the tool that works best for the job at hand.
Nice post. Could you elaborate a bit on your view of self-organizing teams?
Posted by: Michael Arnoldus | July 28, 2006 at 12:48 AM
As a person on the Left who's still a Democrat, I have to take issue with at least half of that initial political statement---the Democratic Party is a centrist party well to the right of any Christian Democrat party in Europe.
Perhaps the rightists in the Republican Party would say the equivalent about theirs, but if I tended to trust their observational powers and judgement I would be one of them, and I'm not.
(The problem: we've got a moderately powerful extreme Right in this country---property rights absolutists, truculent militarists, and outright theocrats---for Republicans to look moderate next-to; in the absence of any real Leftism visible, anything to the left of Richard Nixon can be tarred as 'extreme'. If there were prominent, actual, doctrinaire Socialists in our politics, people could see the daylight between them and nearly all Democrats, and definitely the powerful ones.)
Posted by: Gerald Fnord | November 07, 2011 at 02:31 PM