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Agile is treating another disease

October 13th, 2009 Leave a comment Go to comments

“But agile is not going to reduce the technology complexity load, which is the root cause of the problem.”

This is a quote from Interesting post with a good discussion thread. However, I do think Ted Neward missed the point.

Agile is not a silver bullet and it does not solve all software development industry problems. Agile is about people. It solves many problems in software development process. It addresses business-to-development team communication. It addresses collaboration in a single development team. It addresses organizational problems and constant improvements. It evangelizes simplicity, simplest tools and solutions that work in particular conditions. It changes people’s mindset.

Yes, there are horde of new technologies on the market. There are so many cool new programming languages, development platforms, MDA solutions and tools. We are climbing abstraction mountain, rising abstractions layers. How many people write pure C code these days? Do you remember Assembler? DSL is coming (it is already there!) and will add one more abstraction layer on top of OOP. What’s next? I don’t know. But  agile movement will sustain with new technologies. These are orthogonal phenomena: Technology and People.

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  • http://www.adsdevshop.com Robert Dempsey

    The focus needs to be on the methodology first and foremost, and then adding the tools that best suit the situation, and will provide the information necessary for both the business and development teams. No matter what tools or languages or technology you’re working with, Agile as a methodology can work if your organization and culture can support it. Having too many tools, well that’s another situation, and a problem that Agile isn’t meant to solve.

  • http://agilista.wordpress.com Jonathan Harley

    And that culture is based on trust. The biggest thing I don’t hear most often is that ‘Agile’ is a shared responsibility, shared accountability culture.

    Early in the maturity cycle, a strict methodology is important. As the team(s) mature in their use of Agile techniques, they become self organizing and the specifics are less important than the delivery, and the culture of mutual trust and responsibility for that delivery.

  • Chuck van der Linden

    I think agile is about a culture of people working in ways that that allow them to respond rapidly and easily to change. That requires a lot of things happen ‘right’ from how we communicate with each other, to processes that minimize doing un-needed or un-used work, to practices that make it easier to change and modify code without injecting defects in the process. So yes it’s about people, but also HOW people use technology and how those people work together.

    Any time we try to nail agile down to one single thing, we’re likely to be wrong.

    It’s like trying to say that ‘baking a cake is all about the flour’. While flour is important, and the wrong flour will cause things to go bad, it’s just one element that goes into making a cake, including other ingredients, as well as the process of how we combine then and bake the cake.

  • http://www.targetprocess.com Michael Dubakov

    Yes, I agree that it is hard to describe agile with a single world. But in the original article author focuses on technological complexity. Agile addresses sociological complexity more. So it is more about people.

  • AndrewGolik

    I'm of opinion that people don't get what is agile is. The agile is more about mindset.
    It's not limited in its ability to perform efficiently if you possess base for it. If not first you need to build it. You cannot consider the agile as remedy of your tech problems.
    There are a lot of practices from XP to work out. You also need people that are able to accomplish their tasks as well as skills. I'm not talking about new tech skills but base programming skills. It's really important to possess good code base. In this case the agile perform extreme efficiently. Otherwise it heads you to nowhere.

  • AndrewGolik

    I always thought that XP addresses tech problems in most.