People Still Don’t Get It
I’m not sure everyone actually gets the point of view those of us talking about pliant software development and post-agilism and the like are coming from. We aren’t starting a movement, we are describing one. We aren’t trying to change peoples’ minds, we are trying to get people to think about what they are doing and not just blindly accept what the latest “consultant” hired by head office to ‘revolutionize our software process’ is saying.
I said it before and I’ll say it again… I don’t know how you should build your software. No one but you can figure that out.
What Agile has become is the exact opposite and _that_ is why it appears pliancy and post-agilism are explicitly anti-Agile. We aren’t anti-Agile, we’ve just moved on.
Some people however, _still_ can’t agree on what Agile is. They still think Agile is about the Agile Manifesto, when in reality, the book sellers and conference promoters moved on from the manifesto years ago. Agile (and every other ‘process’ being hawked to unsuspecting enterprises) is about selling stuff and if you can’t see that, then I can’t help you move on. Denying a problem doesn’t actually solve it.
on April 23rd, 2007 at 2:25 pm
Perhaps you’re right - that there are lots of people out there selling books and promoting conferences who don’t really care about what agile is really supposed to be about. If your goal is to get people to think and have some common sense, I certainly applaud you. That’s always a good thing! I wonder though, is defining new terms - post-agilism or pliant software - really going to do the trick? Let’s say you succeed and people gravitate toward pliant software. Will there not then be conferences about pliant software and books published about it with the same low motives that we see in “agile” today?
on April 23rd, 2007 at 2:43 pm
Nope. That’s the whole point. There is no money to be made in pliant software development or post-agilism because we explicitly do not endorse any methodology or technique.
If people gravitate towards pliant software then there will be a larger market for many different books, conferences and consultants on various different ways to develop software, Agile presumably being one of them. This is precisely because pliant says to evaluate your options and your context and figure out how best to do the job. But we don’t do the work for you. Of course most companies aren’t going to buy into this philosophy because it is more costly to evaluate your options then it is to latch on to something and invest in it heavily even if it doesn’t quite work for that company.
on May 1st, 2007 at 8:12 am
“Many C++ design decisions have their roots in my dislike for forcing people to do things in some particular way. In history, some of the worst disasters have been caused by idealists trying to force people into ‘doing what is good for them’. Such idealism not only heads to suffering among its innocent victims, but also to delusion and corruption of the idealists applying the force . . . . I also find idealists prone to ignore experience and experiment that inconveniently clashes with dogma or theory. Where ideals clash and sometimes even when pundits seem to agree, I prefer to provide support that gives the programmer a choice.”
“My preference is to slowly — often painfully slowly — persuade people to try new techniques and adapt the ones that suit their needs and tastes.”
“This was part of a philosophy of fostering self-sufficiency among users. The aim was always — and explicitly — to develop local expertise in all aspects of using C++. Most organizations must follow the opposite strategy. They keep users dependent on services that generate revenues for a central support organization, consultants or both. In my opinion, this contrast is a fundamental difference between C++ and many other languages.”
— Bjarne Stroustrup, The Design And Evolution of C++, Sections 1.3 and 2.5.1, writing in 1994 about his design philosophies of the early days of C++ in the early 1980s.