Is Agile a Mirage?
Worse Than Failure has departed from their usual fare of tragic but funny stories from the IT industry to comment on The Great Pyramid of Agile. Agile development has always been one of those oases off in the distance for me: “Real developers do agile and everything else is old fashioned and inefficient”. I have spent more than a little time wishing that a current project was more agile and that we weren’t wasting so much time on obsolete specifications and schedule readjustment.
There are, however, naysayers saying that agile development is just a pipe dream and that we should as developers stick to the methods that we know, even if they are less than perfect. Who is right?
I suspect that a lot of the ideas that the agilists promote like test driven development and continuous integration are valuable contributions to the field of software engineering. I also think that software development is such a complex process that there will never be a definitive answer one way or the other, no matter how the proponents on each side want there to be.
The problem is that humans get involved and what started as a discussion of new ideas becomes a political/religious debate with entrenched views on each side. Developers in the trenches need to be more pragmatic than that. There is software to write and projects to complete and they will use whatever they can to get the job done.
The key thing to remember is never to stop learning.
