Your Agile Process Sucks

I am so sick of people throwing the term "agile" around like some sort of magic pixie dust that can be sprinkled on projects, making them somehow robust, easy to build and otherwise wonderful. Like any popular idea, it has been hijacked by the same people who screwed up permission marketing, business process reengineering, and other things that started out as good ideas.

It's just a hammer - it's only good for nails. Not everything is a nail. There are two really irritating things going on:

1. Ideas have boundary conditions. They're not randomly good for everything, they always have sets of conditions under which they work, and sets of conditions under which they don't work. Agile is not appropriately applied to every case.



2. People throw around ideas they don't understand. "Agile" generally refers to a group of software development methodologies, including Extreme Programming, Scrum and Crystal. These processes do things differently from each other, and just saying "Let's do this agile" doesn't mean a whole lot by itself.

Just Because It's Best Practice Doesn't Make It Agile Let's build stuff in iterations! Yeah, that's agile! Uh, actually the concept of iterations somewhat precedes the whole agile thing - they just adopted it because, well, it's a good idea. Also items like code reviews, version control and a lot of communication with the client are not uniquely agile, they're just ways that we've learned are a good way to build software.
Calling it agile doesn't make it so To truly build something in a lightweight manner takes commitment and courage. Things like having small, quick releases, a flexible scope, little or no documentation. Far too many people throw the "a-word" around their developer process and then settle back into their 2000 pages of documentation.
Agile is not a business plan The grass is always greener on the other side for disciplines. Software developers (for some reason) seem to wish they were architects, so they steal concepts like "design patterns" and "information architecture" - trying to capture the architect mojo. Business, in turn, steals from tech - speaking of management concepts in terms of "bandwidth" and, yes "agile". To say "we're an agile business" is meaningless, and borders on intentional obfuscation - its an attempt to appear hip without actually making a commitment to any specific practice. Much like using the word "impact" as a verb, the easy mis-use of "agile" by people in the practice of nothing particular moves the term itself, which was sort of useful at one point, to a state of complete meaninglessness. I have to suppress the urge to snicker every time I hear someone flinging the magic pixie dust around. Maybe I'm allergic to it.