AGILE IN ACTION

Jeff Patton recently tweeted:

At Agile2008, I watched Ron Jeffries and Chet Hendrickson talk about the natural laws of software development.

There's a lot of discussion going on about dogmatic people missing the point about being agile. The point being to adapt and be agile rather than enforcing the practices. It's certainly a fair point. But I see a lot of things being done by people and organizations in the name of adaptation that, quite frankly, I consider compromising. Specifically, their adaptations compromise the value system and the principles behind the Agile Manifesto.

After 6 months I'm still really enjoying my current contract. However, I can relate to Siddharta Govindaraj's 5 dangers when adopting Agile. I'm contracted by a department in a large organization and I'm working on a project that is part of a much larger program of work. Like any work, it has its ups and downs. The ups generally relate to the project, the people I'm working with and not having to compromise on our team's use of Extreme Programming, Scrum and Lean thinking. The downs are moments of annoying frustration when we encounter the wider program and its organization, bureaucracy and dysfunction.

I don't like the pick-and-mix approach to agile practices (I'm talking about Extreme Programming and Scrum), especially in the name of pragmatism. What about the values and principles?

At my current client, I've sown an Agile seed in a command-and-control environment. The organization's culture is predominantly process-heavy, document-driven and full of waste. Nevertheless, my seedling grows. Nurturing it every day, I was inspired to write these statements as I witness the emergence of an Agile subculture.