Comments on: The death of agile

By: Zoe Smith

Zoe Smith — Mon, 07 Mar 2011 16:29:24 +0000

Well, well – amazing that my brother and I land up on the same page sometimes.

Mike, don’t know if you remember the somewhat tortuous title of my MBA dissertation – ‘multi paradigm multi methodologies as a method of managing IT projects’?! What this is about is that we can look at using both hard and soft paradigms as a means of managing IT projects – and maybe a combination of both is better at different stages of the SDLC (whether or not we’re waterfall, agile etc). There are some great techniques and approaches out there (including Agile, Kanban and other softer approaches) but in my humble opinion, the good project manager should be able to:

1) Select the methodologies most appropriate for the project under development at a particular point in time based on a variety of criteria. These would include scope, organisational culture, objectives, resources (both personalities and constraints) etc.

2) Implement those methodologies throughout the project’s lifecycle at the most appropriate time because that’s what suits – and not because that’s what some Quality Manual says you have to. (Which, as a QA manager, feels a little odd).

What I want to say is, that as an industry, we need to ‘professionalise’ ourselves, and we can learn a good deal from our colleagues in Operations Research. We may be the new kids on the block, but that block wasn’t build yesterday.

By: Anness

Anness — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 02:08:16 +0000

Interesting post Mike. I work with companies that are just implementing Agile or are adding to the current Agile practices they already have in place. Many companies are still stuck in a rut when it comes to implementing Agile, and so I'm not to surprised that the Agile 2xxx confs had tracks for newbies. As Seth Godin says, we will always be dealing with new people, so producing content on the basics for these folks is a necessity. On the tools and pseudo-agile consulting firms, I see that in many areas of tech, so it was bound to happen with Agile. Companies are going to need to look at how well their current tools and methods work, where they need to be improved, and either go that route or choose a tool that will work better to meet their goals. And for people complaining about the current state of Agile, I'm glad I don't talk with those people. That gets old real fast.

I don't think Agile, or at least not Agile principles, is dead. I see more companies going down the road. Ultijately all their goals are the same – better transparency into projects, predicable delivery, and faster dekivery of value to customers. Agile is one way to help these things happen.

And whether or not there is a glut of consultants or not weighing down the community, Agile has laid a foundation that we can all build on.;

By: Julian Simpson

Julian Simpson — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 15:36:56 +0000

Agile is a good development methodology, maybe the best, but its just a dev method and the danger of quick iterations is the possibility of missing the goal & or increasing disorganization as complexity increases. That’s where a clever bunch of people comes in handy, because they hold it together. If you put a clever bunch of people together then it increases the chance of success…well done to the people who made a shed load of cash of being more competitive than other people who were less creative, intelligent and savvy. However, it still takes huge amounts of cash to do development work and Agile doesn’t do much that is new to remove the risks of failure in IT projects.

By: Robert Dempsey

Robert Dempsey — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 20:34:01 +0000

Interesting post Mike. I work with companies that are just implementing Agile or are adding to the current Agile practices they already have in place. Many companies are still stuck in a rut when it comes to implementing Agile, and so I’m not to surprised that the Agile 2xxx confs had tracks for newbies. As Seth Godin says, we will always be dealing with new people, so producing content on the basics for these folks is a necessity. On the tools and pseudo-agile consulting firms, I see that in many areas of tech, so it was bound to happen with Agile. Companies are going to need to look at how well their current tools and methods work, where they need to be improved, and either go that route or choose a tool that will work better to meet their goals. And for people complaining about the current state of Agile, I’m glad I don’t talk with those people. That gets old real fast.

I don’t think Agile, or at least not Agile principles, is dead. I see more companies going down the road. Ultimately all their goals are the same – better transparency into projects, predicable delivery, and faster delivery of value to customers. Agile is one way to help these things happen.

And whether or not there is a glut of consultants or not weighing down the community, Agile has laid a foundation that we can all build on.