The meaning of Agile is to stop focusing on the wrong things.
One person on the Internet asked me what I can say in favor of Agile methodologies.
Agile what? There is no such thing as an Agile methodology.
Everything is very simple. First of all, the guys from the Agile Manifesto did not have the word "Agile". Secondly, they didn’t say do something, do it, they just said that we are focusing on the wrong things .
In almost every respect, Agile began to symbolize the best practices in iterative / incremental development. Each practitioner has his own views, but, despite this, some consensus has formed in the community. This is great - diversity is good, but the reason why we need a manifesto is not gone: as a rule, we focus on the wrong things. This is part of who we are, as technical specialists.
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We write backlog as detailed as we can, so that they meet all the requirements. We say “customer interaction” and we want to remove any paper work, focusing on the final person. We have a Product Owner and we want to pretend that no one else is in the company. We say “software quality” and we want to pretend that the quality of the code is more important than some late decision with bugs. When we understand that we are too smart with architecture, we cut out all the architecture and design. We are talking about following Agile practices and emphasizing how well the team played the game, instead of really measuring what was achieved.
No matter how many times we tried, it seems we cannot find a good balance. We constantly want to go too far one way, then the other.
It's hard to say “enough.” Even those of us who love Agile and want to see how it helps, as a rule, perceive it too close to the heart. Can the world be agile? Perhaps, but this is not the main thing now. Most normal experts either ignore Agile or take it too seriously. Most of those who practice Agile, or love the idea and can talk about it for hours, or find it bad and dangerous.
Stop distractions. Documents, practices, experiences, games, communication formats, and personal characteristics are not terrible problems and not wonderful panaceas. Focusing closely on one area - backlogging, testing, project planning or something else, we eventually forget that the most important thing is that all these things are interconnected and they must be balanced in different ways.
Many of us see Agile as some kind of concept built on the underlying theory. Therefore, many presentations and books begin with a manifesto and basic principles. It is as if we were writing a book on geometry and starting out with axioms, in order to formulate complex proofs later. We continue to look for yes and no, right and wrong behavior, derived from first principles. But it does not work that way, we only create what we wanted to leave.
Stop focusing on the wrong things.
Agile what? There is no such thing as an Agile methodology.
Everything is very simple. First of all, the guys from the Agile Manifesto did not have the word "Agile". Secondly, they didn’t say do something, do it, they just said that we are focusing on the wrong things .
In almost every respect, Agile began to symbolize the best practices in iterative / incremental development. Each practitioner has his own views, but, despite this, some consensus has formed in the community. This is great - diversity is good, but the reason why we need a manifesto is not gone: as a rule, we focus on the wrong things. This is part of who we are, as technical specialists.
')
We write backlog as detailed as we can, so that they meet all the requirements. We say “customer interaction” and we want to remove any paper work, focusing on the final person. We have a Product Owner and we want to pretend that no one else is in the company. We say “software quality” and we want to pretend that the quality of the code is more important than some late decision with bugs. When we understand that we are too smart with architecture, we cut out all the architecture and design. We are talking about following Agile practices and emphasizing how well the team played the game, instead of really measuring what was achieved.
No matter how many times we tried, it seems we cannot find a good balance. We constantly want to go too far one way, then the other.
It's hard to say “enough.” Even those of us who love Agile and want to see how it helps, as a rule, perceive it too close to the heart. Can the world be agile? Perhaps, but this is not the main thing now. Most normal experts either ignore Agile or take it too seriously. Most of those who practice Agile, or love the idea and can talk about it for hours, or find it bad and dangerous.
Stop distractions. Documents, practices, experiences, games, communication formats, and personal characteristics are not terrible problems and not wonderful panaceas. Focusing closely on one area - backlogging, testing, project planning or something else, we eventually forget that the most important thing is that all these things are interconnected and they must be balanced in different ways.
Many of us see Agile as some kind of concept built on the underlying theory. Therefore, many presentations and books begin with a manifesto and basic principles. It is as if we were writing a book on geometry and starting out with axioms, in order to formulate complex proofs later. We continue to look for yes and no, right and wrong behavior, derived from first principles. But it does not work that way, we only create what we wanted to leave.
Stop focusing on the wrong things.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/144147/
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