Agile Methodologies; New age airy-fairyness or actually serious?

[rollingergrund]

The title of the thread demonstrates the problem, Agile is not a methodology, any more than unit testing, users working alongside developers, peer reviews, whiteboard design, CRC cards are methodologies. Any job advert that asks for Agile methodologies has clearly not doing agile software development. Agile when used correctly and appropriately is very effective and more effective than most other approaches, but it does have limitations.

Agile usually becomes Fragile i.e. code breaks all over the place, stuff doesn't work

Then what is happening is not following the Agile manifesto then, Agile projects (run as Agile projects) the opposite is true.

folk do what is 'pragmatic'

Yes that is the Agile approach

i.e. ony the easy-peasy parts and shelve the necessary difficult parts; all in search of silver bullet technology mega-futz.

You take from Agile which is appropriate for your project, the biggest factor on what you can and cannot use from Agile is the organisation and processes you have to work with.

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There are some upsides like CI, Unit Testing, attention of business users (because they can see what the dirty IT geeky folk are doing - a bit more.)
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I think like many others in the industry you have totally misunderstood what Agile is about.

[MrGrunge]

The title of the thread demonstrates the problem, Agile is not a methodology, any more than unit testing, users working alongside developers, peer reviews, whiteboard design, CRC cards are methodologies. Any job advert that asks for Agile methodologies has clearly not doing agile software development. Agile when used correctly and appropriately is very effective and more effective than most other approaches, but it does have limitations.




Then what is happening is not following the Agile manifesto then, Agile projects (run as Agile projects) the opposite is true.

If Agile is a manifesto rather than a process/methodology/way of thinking/whatever; then is it not open to interpretation, lacking in definition, and likely to become a political manifesto/quasi-religious cult (consciously or unconsciously on behalf of the participants)? i.e. non defined Agility can easily become an instrument of mis-management in the same manner as much as any dogma in any other walk of life.

Although not particularly moved one way or the other, there do seem to be numerous interpretations as to what Agility is. Personally, I don't really have an opinion as to what it is, and view it as more or less as a phenomena of our times, in the same way as baseball hats became an ever expanding fashion accessory about 20 years ago.

Yes that is the Agile approach

If 'pragmatic' means not converting double to BigDecimal in an ecommerce app without folk screaming etc (as I have recently witnessed); then I'm not sure of the value.

You take from Agile which is appropriate for your project, the biggest factor on what you can and cannot use from Agile is the organisation and processes you have to work with.
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I largely agree with this.

I think like many others in the industry you have totally misunderstood what Agile is about.

Then prey inform me as to what 'Agile' is about. I am largely neutral about what 'Agile' is, and don't concern myself with Agility a whole lot, other than its part of the general banner in about 80% of the projects that I work on now, I merely report on what I have experienced in folks Agile projects, almost all of which do not meet their objectives, but do exhibit some interesting activities and artifacts from time to time.

One aspect that I do like is where a small number of complementary folk can work together in a fairly chaotic and explorative way. This does depend on folk being complementary i.e. different folk bring slightly different ingredients to the pie and co-operate in the cooking of the meal. However this seems to be rare for one reason or another e.g. too many folk involved generally to enable such a setup, or political animals view Agility as a way to throw their weight about ( a bit like a hippo shifting dingleberries of its posterior with its tail.)

[thunderlizard]

"The word Agile has worked hard for 10 years. I can forgive it for being knackered"

-Ward Cunningham on Twitter yesterday.

(OK, strictly speaking he said "tired" not "knackered").

[rd409]

The biggest advantage of being AGILE is "It adds up few tenners on my daily rate". That's it pretty much. It has got nothing new apart from the jargons, which I can blag about during any interview, and make the client believe that he knows so little than me