Agile: Just the way things are done
August 11, 2011 —
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SALT LAKE CITY — Agile is still growing, the principles are strong, and there is conflict among certain teams who try to be perfect in an imperfect world. Those three principles are what the analysts from Forrester, Gartner, IDC and Ovum discussed at a roundtable talk at Agile 2011 on Tuesday night.
Michael Azoff, Melinda Ballou, Thomas Murphy and David West gave their views on the "park bench" Agile Manifesto presentation, as well as answers to some of the questions from the conference’s attendees.
West said the manifesto actually held up better than the United States Constitution: There haven’t been any amendments. He believed, though, that including the term “teams” in the Manifesto might have been interesting, an idea one of the Manifesto's signatories mentioned in the park bench session.
Azoff felt that the most important takeaway from the Manifesto and the agile movement is that “agile” should no longer be a buzzword, but simply the way things are done.
The biggest question, he said, is, “How do we build software?” Agile has gone a long way to answer that question.
“Waterfall came from manufacturing, and so the problems with software manufacturing were thought to be a technical issue, but software development is very much about how teams work and solving those issues solves the problems with development,” said Azoff. He added that this way of looking at software development allows psychology to be considered in decision-making, positive emotions and how teams work—something that was the subject of many sessions at the conference.
The term "ScrumBut" is one of the main contention points among conference attendees, thought leaders and analysts. Henrik Kniberg, agile and Lean coach at Crisp and part of the Scrum Alliance, said, “I wish the derogatory term ScrumBut would die. Sometimes ScrumBut is a problem, sometimes ScrumBut is a solution.”
ScrumBut refers to teams using the Scrum methodology, but also including elements of other processes with which they are comfortable. The analysts described this as part of the growth and maturation of agile adoption; it is a philosophy, not a strict process.
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