Saving Agile
Brian Marick has been elected chair of the Agile Alliance and has an interesting proposal.
I’m not really concerned with the actual proposal, since frankly, I think it is too late to de-hijack ‘Agile’ and anything they do will be for naught. What really interests me is the fact that the Agile Alliance (by electing Marick who ran on the platform of this proposal) has recognized that things aren’t completely hunky-dory in Agile land. Marick has a bunch of Whereas statements at the beginning of the proposal, but the one that sticks out for me is the following:
Whereas the number of people new to Agile who describe their project as “the best project I’ve ever worked on” seems to be declining, and we believe work should be joyful,
I could be my typical snide and sarcastic self and say something in mock shock and awe, but I’m going to resist this time and actually applaud this important recognition. Agile isn’t all it is cracked up to be. It doesn’t always produce successful projects. It doesn’t always produce happy programmers. It doesn’t always produce delighted customers. The sooner we realize this, the sooner we can move on, or in the case of the Agile Alliance, the sooner they can attempt to patch up the beast.
This should be interesting.