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Agile development: Dogma vs. degree

By David Rubinstein

June 8, 2009 — (Page 1 of 3)
So, just how agile is your agile process?

While those who preach the dogma of the Agile Manifesto have loosened their belief that agile is an all-or-nothing affair, debate continues over what constitutes an agile development shop.

On one side of the argument are those who believe that adopting any of the steps is a move toward agility; that the important thing is not adherence to the steps but instead an improvement in the organization’s software development. Others acknowledge that any improvement is beneficial, but the technique employed can’t be called agile if the practices of XP, or Scrum, or the other agile methodologies are not followed to the letter.

“Any really meaty trend has great dogmatism to get started. Otherwise, who’s going to follow you?” said VersionOne CEO Robert Holler. “You throw the gauntlet down and get followers. There’s nothing like great controversy to make things happen. It had to start that way.”

That said, Holler noted that extremism about agile might not be every organization’s reality. “People are realistic enough to know they can localize it to meet their internal business requirements. They might water things down, but are they improving? It’s come to a reasonable state now. When applying agile in mainstream software organizations, you can’t change overnight. But are things improving?”

Consultant Paul Hodgetts of Agile Logic said he’s seeing a lot of agile development happening in enterprise shops at varying degrees of implementation. “Agile seems to be on the radar for most CEOs and CIOs, like offshoring was a couple of years ago. They’re at least looking into it to stay current.

“The ones that are implementing deeper and broader and getting real big payoffs are limited,” he continued. "I’d say one out of 10 big organizations are really taking it deep enough across the organization” to see the big payoff, he said. “One-third to one-half stall out pretty quickly. They hit plateaus and they stop. There are some organizational changes they’d have to make that they either can’t or are unwilling to get past.”

Related Search Term(s): agile

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