SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Andy Hunt - one of the originators of the Agile Manifesto, and NOT your humble submitter - has concluded that Agile has lost its way:
in the 14 years since then, we‘ve lost our way. The word “agile” has become sloganized; meaningless at best, jingoist at worst. We have large swaths of people doing “flacid agile,” a half-hearted attempt at following a few select software development practices, poorly. We have scads of vocal agile zealots—as per the definition that a zealot is one who redoubles their effort after they've forgotten their aim.
And worst of all, agile methods themselves have not been agile. Now there‘s an irony for you.
How did we get into this mess?
The basis of an agile approach is to embrace change; to be aware of changes to the product under development, the needs and wishes of the users, the environment, the competition, the market, the technology; all of these can be volatile fountains of change. To embrace the flood of changes, agile methods advise us to “inspect and adapt.” That is, to figure out what‘s changed and adapt to it by changing our methods, refactoring our code, collaborating with our customers, and so on. But most agile adopters simply can‘t do that, for a very good reason. When you are first learning a new skill—a new programming language, or a new technique, or a new development method—you do not yet have the experience, mental models, or ability to handle an abstract concept such as “inspect and adapt.” Those abilities are only present in practitioners with much more experience, at higher skill levels
Andy also has some thoughts on how to correct this - starting with the idea that Agile methodologies must be applied to Agile methodologies, to allow them to adapt to changing needs.
(Score: 1) by anubi on Saturday May 09 2015, @03:43AM
I would sure think so. I have heard of all these pairings of a specific library to a specific program called "DLL HELL".
In all fairness, they did require me to install Microsoft .NET redistributables, and I probably chose the wrong one during installation. I have a 64 bit machine and it wanted me to check which one I wanted loaded. My guess is all my problems arose from choosing what looked like a 64 bit program to run on a 64 bit machine.
Ten years from now it may be damned near impossible to get all the pairings correct for a program to run. I am pretty sure the old DOS machine will run until its power supply capacitors give out.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]