The Mindset

When I started reading Steve Yegge’s latest article I was optimistic. The title sounded promising. The quote from Wikipedia was great. And the arguments against the Agilism religion were well articulated. The first couple of pages were really a great read.
Then, as I began to read Steve’s description of “the Google experience”, my enthusiasm started […]

In a recent article, James Shore describes the dynamics in the CardMeeting project.

“All of these things would have been good things to fix. In particular, implementing tests would actually have made us faster, and it would have only taken a week or two at most to figure out how to use TDD in our UI- […]

Well, it’s been a day since I came across the sheer genius of Agile Draw and I still cannot get it out of my mind. There are so many possibilities for nurturing the Agile hype. There are so many opportunities for writing books, creating workshops, coming up with certification programs – in short making money. […]

Just when I thought I have seen it all when it comes to the Agile hype… I came across Agile Draw.
This is waaaaaaaaaaaaaaay too much. I can just see it coming:

Workshops for practicing whiteboard sketching
Courses for learning the new and innovative semantics (especially how to properly use colors to express your emotions)
And of course […]

In my previous post I questioned the popularity of peer reviews in the real-world. I claimed that there might be a good reason that most organizations are not practicing systematic peer reviews: the nature of peer reviews causes too much overhead and context switching, which makes them ineffective for the long run.
But what about […]

Originally, I wanted to wish my US readers a happy 4th of July. Then, I came across this post, and I thought to myself: is this yet another Agile hijacking?
My prediction is that in ten years from now either no one will use the word “Agile” in the context of software development, or everything in […]

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about The Semi Myth Of YAGNI. The message of that post was that there are cases where trying to anticipate the future evolution of the product is the best approach. In those cases, doing the simplest thing possible today without analyzing where the product is going is also […]

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about The Hijacking Of The Word Agile. In that post I’ve mentioned Jim Coplien’s book Organizational Patterns of Agile Software Development.
And today, a new comment was added to this post by… Jim Coplien. Due to the illusive nature of the Web I can’t know the author’s identity for […]

Welcome back to the “Only Part of the Story” show. In today’s episode, we are going to revisit one of the most common Agile statements, which seems to make a lot of sense. But as you can guess, it’s only part of the story.
We will do that with the help of this blog post […]

Before you read this post let me assure you that Agile Development is great. It includes some common sense ideas and good practices which can help many projects succeed.
Now that we got this out of our way, let’s start.
The word “Agile” was first hijacked to describe a set of software development processes, methodologies, practices […]