Agile Sense of Humour
Judging by a few recent blog posts it is important for anyone doing agile software development to have a good sense of humour.
Jeff Atwood, of Coding Horror fame, says that his team have adopted Scrum and then rants about how they “say ‘agile’ to avoid all the weird connotations of the word Scrum”. See also Jeff’s post Chickens, Pigs, and Really Inappropriate Terminology.
However, Jeff’s rant is tiny compared to Steve Yegge’s rambling pair:
Good Agile, Bad Agile
Egomania Itself
There are some good points and humour buried in those posts, and it is always helpful to get an alternate point of view. Here’s my take:
Steve works for Google. Google has lots of money, and employs the cream of the crop. They launch products when they are ready. They have a culture that is alien to most software development groups.
Some examples of how agile processes like Scrum don’t work would be very helpful, but Steve doesn’t provide any. (Some teams at Google do use Scrum.)
Back in my world, there are no silver bullets, so jumping on the latest Agile fad with your eyes closed is not wise. Agile methodologies are about people and process. They are one way of improving the value that most development teams provide to their customers.
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6 November 2006, 19:57
There is a thread worth reading on the Scrum User mailing list that discusses Steve Yegge’s posts. The point that jumped out at me most was that the issues that Steve raised are the result of agile processes uncovering dysfunction, not the processes themselves.