Public Class GeoffAppleby

Geoff,

The problem I have with Agile is that it is a green light for 'agile developers' and their managers to drive a coach-and-horses hell-for-leather through quality considerations without any forthought (you can tell I'm getting worked up - I'm mixing metaphors again).

Agile and XP dignifies teams that don't do design, and who do regular untested hot-fixes on production, with a Methodology. They assume it gives them permission to cut every damn corner in the book!

I'm not bitter, you understand, just weary.

I agree that Monolithic methodologies are just as bad. Take telstra for example - they have this huge waterfall model called TDP - but they have a get-out clause called TDP-tailoring, which allows them to adjust the methodology to the project. The problem is, they ignore every rule in the book (even the unwritten ones) and then when all hell breaks loose thay call it TDP-tailoring -  a get out of jail free card.

I'm not bitter, you understand, just weary.

Hi Geoff,

I've seen maybe 50 agile projects fail. Each for a differnt reason, but all due to an interpretation of what agile means. Half the problem is people grab what they want; Xtreme Programming--peering--lack of documentation, whatever--and call the resultant lack of methodology "agile". Some agile practitioners deem all doco bad because it is always wrong. However, even outdated, badly interpreted doco can give an idea of the general principles and "big picture" of the deisgn so remains valuable. Reading the code shows what has been done; not why!

25+ years has given me a bigoted view of what works and what doesn't. Waterfall-sometimes but only for specific projects. Iterative is great, but only when you can get the feedback you need between iterations. Sometimes just talented people working together produce the best results--so long as they talk.

Having just been through CMMI certification and (unfortuantely) reporting on over 160 projects, I can see the bad side of all methodologies. However, I haven't seen an agile one succeed (hence the bias) but I have seen good people working together have great results. Even when it is called waterfall. And even when it is iterative.

Yes... Nothing much to do on this Friday night anyway. I haven't used .NET 3 (WCF in particular) before--pretty cool but currently bleeding edge and not yet as reliable as we could wish for. As you'd expect, the team remains a great bunch of enthusiastic folk. Not that I'm around much; just interfering around the edges, stirring the pot and (maybe) writing more spaghetti code.