Are You Agile? Cosmo Tells You The Truth
This little quiz designed to measure your company’s agility just makes me cringe. It reduces the idea of ‘Agile’ to a few soundbites and gives the impression (once again) that there is a formula for ‘doing Agile’.
It’s like when your partner comes over with her copy of Cosmo and asks you to take a ‘relationship quiz’. You know only bad things can come out of it and no matter what you say, the quiz will get you into trouble. For the record, I am lucky enough to have a psychologist for a wife, and she recognizes that those Cosmo quizes are just pop-psych drivel. She doesn’t waste her own time on them, let alone mine. They don’t take into account the people involved in the relationship. They generalize issues (often poorly and based on popular myths in society) that couples may have and attempt to provide advice without the slightest bit of information about the people in the relationship, the current state of the relationship and the history of the relationship. So the ‘results’ of the quiz, if you can call them that, are utterly useless and insignificant if you are actually trying to improve your relationship.
There are no checklists, quizzes, formulas, blog posts, websites, books, seminars, pamphlets, conferences or anything else that can guarantee you success in software development. They all provide interesting ideas and give some ways that _may_ help, but they should all be taken with a giant grain of salt and a giant vat of analysis and thinking (the vat I believe is the standard international unit for analysis and thinking). There are _never_ any guarantees.