ISerializable - Roy Osherove's Blog

I loved Yegge's post on agile. I remember when I adopted agile it seemed revolutionary, so NOT the mainstream of development at my company. It felt like I was the Che Guevara of software development. Like you described, I adopted what worked for my team and I and let the rest fall by the wayside. I never felt the pressure of the Agile Evangelists to convert in full or risk being branded a heretic per se. But given Agile (big a) adoption by the likes of Microsoft and many others, I'm sure Steve saw people labeling everything agile this or agile that and if you dont get it and adopt EVERY practice then you're just not doing it right. So I understand his angst. Personally, I've NEVER felt any pressure by the people I respect in the Agile community, Ken Schwaber, Bob Martin, Martin Fowler, etc. On the contrary, they've been circumspect in pointing out the better way and allowing you to adopt it, in whole or in part. Where I have seen pressure is in corporate America where people tend to sneer down their nose at you if you dont do agile the "right" way (see their way). Most of agile is common sense. Most developers have enough common sense to avoid dogmatic Agile rhetoric and employ pragmatic agile practices. A good agile manager puts his/her people first and foremost and in so doing honors one of agile's primary tenets, self-organizing, self-directed teams who follow their own rules within the guidelines suggested by Agile.

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Imho there is no such thing as Bad or Good Agile.

I think Yegge is correct that parts of Agile are bad... if you work for Google. As some of the comments on his article noted, the level of software engineers at Google is very high. I think that is the main reason Google is successful using their methods. In addition, at Google, the top people generated the culture. They pay the bills. Most companies are not started by people who understand software development. I wish more were. But until more business owners understand software development, we'll have to play by their rules to get the bills paid. Also, Google doesn't have timelines that some companies have to work with. My company has releases that must coincide with the down-time of our end-users. We just don't have the luxury they have at Google. Culture has to come from the top of the company, and sometimes from the end-users of the software we create. We should all do our best to educate those outside of IT what makes the software development process work best.