<story><title>Manifesto for Half-Arsed Agile Software Development</title><url>http://www.halfarsedagilemanifesto.org/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>wpietri</author><text>Beautiful!&lt;p&gt;The thing that really kills me about this is that 90% of the people who are &amp;quot;doing Agile&amp;quot; (which is not a thing that you can do [1]) really believe that they are an Agile shop. And then I will ask as many as 3 questions to find out what they&amp;#x27;re doing is waterfall, or mini-waterfall, or code-n-fix. In the old days I could say, &amp;quot;Hey, you should try one of the Agile processes.&amp;quot; Now they think they are doing that and doing it well (after all, they have certificates!), so what can I even tell them?&lt;p&gt;Everybody I talk to who was involved in the Agile movement in the 2000-2004 time frame has this experience now. Common reactions are rage, tears, and philosophical resignation. (I favor quiet rage, but I suspect resignation would be healthier.) That there are some shops doing very well is consolation, but the early Agile people were hoping for more.&lt;p&gt;For the whippersnappers who are curious about now-ancient history, my theory on how we went wrong is here: &lt;a href=&quot;http://agilefocus.com/2011/02/21/agiles-second-chasm-and-how-we-fell-in/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;agilefocus.com&amp;#x2F;2011&amp;#x2F;02&amp;#x2F;21&amp;#x2F;agiles-second-chasm-and-how...&lt;/a&gt; A big lesson I learned was that if you don&amp;#x27;t have a trademark and use it to keep quality high, your popular term will get buzzworded to death.&lt;p&gt;[1] Agile is an umbrella for actual processes, like Extreme Programming. There is no process called Agile to do. Saying you are &amp;quot;doing Agile&amp;quot; is like somebody saying their house is in America, but not in DC or any of the states, just America. If you point out that it&amp;#x27;s the &lt;i&gt;United States&lt;/i&gt; of America and they have to be somewhere; they just shrug.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>pyre</author><text>&amp;gt; somebody saying their house is in America, but not in DC or any of the states&lt;p&gt;I live on Midway Atoll, you insensitive clod! ;-)&lt;p&gt;(&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Territories_of_the_United_States&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Territories_of_the_United_State...&lt;/a&gt;)</text></comment>
<story><title>Manifesto for Half-Arsed Agile Software Development</title><url>http://www.halfarsedagilemanifesto.org/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>wpietri</author><text>Beautiful!&lt;p&gt;The thing that really kills me about this is that 90% of the people who are &amp;quot;doing Agile&amp;quot; (which is not a thing that you can do [1]) really believe that they are an Agile shop. And then I will ask as many as 3 questions to find out what they&amp;#x27;re doing is waterfall, or mini-waterfall, or code-n-fix. In the old days I could say, &amp;quot;Hey, you should try one of the Agile processes.&amp;quot; Now they think they are doing that and doing it well (after all, they have certificates!), so what can I even tell them?&lt;p&gt;Everybody I talk to who was involved in the Agile movement in the 2000-2004 time frame has this experience now. Common reactions are rage, tears, and philosophical resignation. (I favor quiet rage, but I suspect resignation would be healthier.) That there are some shops doing very well is consolation, but the early Agile people were hoping for more.&lt;p&gt;For the whippersnappers who are curious about now-ancient history, my theory on how we went wrong is here: &lt;a href=&quot;http://agilefocus.com/2011/02/21/agiles-second-chasm-and-how-we-fell-in/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;agilefocus.com&amp;#x2F;2011&amp;#x2F;02&amp;#x2F;21&amp;#x2F;agiles-second-chasm-and-how...&lt;/a&gt; A big lesson I learned was that if you don&amp;#x27;t have a trademark and use it to keep quality high, your popular term will get buzzworded to death.&lt;p&gt;[1] Agile is an umbrella for actual processes, like Extreme Programming. There is no process called Agile to do. Saying you are &amp;quot;doing Agile&amp;quot; is like somebody saying their house is in America, but not in DC or any of the states, just America. If you point out that it&amp;#x27;s the &lt;i&gt;United States&lt;/i&gt; of America and they have to be somewhere; they just shrug.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>shubb</author><text>To me, there are a bunch of people who can&amp;#x27;t do Agile. They have huge legacy software projects, with low test coverage. They have customers that want (or can only cope with) traditional requirements based contracts.&lt;p&gt;In situations where agile doesn&amp;#x27;t make sense, do you think &amp;#x27;fake agile&amp;#x27; can be a better way of working than 1990s waterfall?</text></comment>