Having written a fair bit recently about Agile/Scrum, I found the following post provided an interesting perspective.
The Agile Disease by Luke Halliwell
I don’t agree with everything the Luke wrote, but a lot of his points make sense.
A lot of the benefit of Scrum is handled if people simply use common sense with whatever process they use. I’m happy to say that at my current company, we just put out a major release of our product, included a lot new functionality and platform support, as well as renamed, rebranded and repackaged how we will sell the product, all in a 4 1/2 month development and test cycle, and all WITHOUT using Agile.
That team will be moving to Scrum very soon (corporate mandate), and I’m interested in seeing what, if any, efficiencies they’ll gain. I think the best way to make that team more effective is give them more developers. 🙂 We have a big backlog!
The one point that Luke made that particularly caught my eye — and I’m surprised I didn’t realize it before is the following:
“Individuals and interactions over processes and tools” I couldn’t agree more with, but strangely, Agile is all about following processes and rarely mentions that having top people is the best thing you can ever do for a project (you could say your hiring process is more important than your development process!).
The irony of the first element of the Agile Manifesto and the fact that Scrum imposes quite a bit of process on people — Scrum Master, Product Owner, backlog management, daily standup etc. — should be noted.
Saeed