Friday, December 07, 2007
Agile = Good, Agile Dogma = Bad
Posted on Friday, December 07, 2007 3:29:05 AM (Mountain Standard Time, UTC-07:00)  Comments [2] | 
Categories: Agile

Many people jokingly refer to the "cult" of agile. But the reality is that to outsiders, many Agile teams, particularly those doing Scum, seem to have the messianic zeal of cult members. I think this is just fine, and really no different than the zeal you see from Ruby on Rails converts. These people are simply excited about having found something that really works for them, and they want to tell you about it. This becomes problematic when a dogma emerges - where you start to see semantic arguments which boil down to "I'm more agile than you because X."

What I've seen this week at the Agile Development Methodologies conference is an underlying theme which more or less boils down to:

Agile = good, Dogmatic Agile = bad

Although this seems obvious, it's the sort of thing that's worth repeating because we are starting to see more people engage in "Are you Agile[tm] Enough" debates on blogs and forums. This is dogma rearing it's ugly head. If you happen across these threads, ignore them - they are irrelevant at best and detrimental at worst. Quite simply they are missing the point. The successful groups realize that silver bullets do not exist - agile or otherwise. There simply is no methodology which works for all teams in all situations. The key is to apply the agile concepts to your situation. Try some techniques - keep what works, drop what does not. Inspect and Adapt. But just be sure to leave the dogma out of it!

Thursday, December 06, 2007 8:45:51 PM (Mountain Standard Time, UTC-07:00)
Dilbert recently explained it pretty good here.
Morten
Friday, December 07, 2007 12:15:41 PM (Mountain Standard Time, UTC-07:00)
I've always said that Agile is more of a state of mind than anything else. Recently when I was at devteach, someone asked the question of who's scrum methodology is correct and Oren immediately said "mine!" and he's right, everyone's methodology is correct as long as it works. There are far too many people out there who are doing things because "that's how you're supposed to do things in scrum" instead of actually thinking about their needs and solving their problems. When that happens, you are no longer using a technique; you are being used by one.
Jeff Tucker
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