Recently, there has been a couple of articles criticizing Agile methodology floating around on the internet. I’m sure there are same kind of stuff before. But I just noticed these two because I happen to read Joel’s blog.
Having worked on two Agile teams for the last four years, I have to say that it’s the best four years in my career life. I’ve been living in a perfect world where everybody is Agile. You can imagine how mad I was when some people dare to challenge my “religionâ€. I have to strike back! But before I could do that, there he is, Martin Fowler, my favourite Fowler in the whole world. In his most recent blog entry, he talks about Agile Imposition, which is a way more rational view on Agile. One of the things that I strongly agree with him is that Agile is people oriented. It adjusts the process to follow the human nature. It makes developers happy. The happier a developer is, the better he/she is.
Of course there will be problems. But most of the time these problems exist regardless of what process you are using. How many projects failed because of the methodologies? Both articles above mentioned the cancellation of Chrysler’s C3 project. C’mon, don’t you have to define failure before you say something failed? This is especially true in software development. C3 project went live, didn’t it? And how did the first waterfall project go? Nobody ever said Agile is a silver bullet except the people who are trying to make it look bad. But before you do that, try living as a developer in an Agile team for a couple of months, OK?
We should all thank Martin Fowler for standing out on this one. Go read his blog. He’s a way better writer than I am.
This was written at Vancouver airport on October 6. The posting was delayed due to the lack of internet access.
