Calling All Agile Leaders
In all seriousness, I am extremely interested in the thoughts and opinions of some of the better known people in the Agile industry, people we would consider leaders. The signers of the Agile Manifesto would be a good place to start. I am curious what they think of ‘doing Agile’ vs ‘being agile’. I am curious whether Agile is just a marketing term or if the original intent was to promote actually developing software in an agile manner. Are they stepping back from supporting specific methodologies like XP and Scrum? Are they for or against blanket imposition of Agile techniques on a team, regardless of the context and consequences?
Martin Fowler recently posted about Agile Imposition and thankfully he is not in favor of it.
But agile methods aren’t the best for all situations, and personally I’d rather have a team work in a non-agile manner they chose themselves than have my favorite agile practices imposed upon them.
Any other leaders out there with opinions on all this? Are they publicly going to comment here (or anywhere on the web for that matter) if their opinions have changed over the last couple of years? I’d like to hear from them. I’ll even offer to post comments (direct quotes or not) anonymously if any of them want to email me privately.
This should be interesting …
on October 10th, 2006 at 1:26 pm
BTW, I’m not so arrogant that I think signers of the Agile Manifesto actually read this, but I figured given 6 degrees of seperation, one of them might find out about it.
on October 27th, 2006 at 6:49 pm
Here’s a post of mine about how my opinions have changed: http://www.testing.com/cgi-bin/blog/2006/01/29#five-years-on
I’m worried that Agile is being domesticated, but don’t have anything clear to say just yet.
By the way, that post of mine on marketing has often been misinterpreted. It is not “we cynically made up a marketing term, hence we didn’t believe in any of it,” it’s “we made up a marketing term as a side effect of the serious work of coming to agreement, and some people take the word ‘Agile’ way too seriously.”