

Ask HN: Agile - Pros and Cons? - singular

Hi all,<p>The company I work for are on the verge of introducing the agile project methodology to our coding process.<p>Having read Steve Yegge's Good Agile, Bad Agile - http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2006/09/good-agile-bad-agile_27.html - I am somewhat skeptical about it being anything more than an unnecessary fad.<p>What are HNer's experiences with agile and would you recommend/advise against it?<p>UPDATE: Changed title to something less black and white :-)
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bombs
_Extreme Programming Refactored: The Case Against XP_
[<http://apress.com/book/view/9781590590966>] was a fun book for showing the
other side of the XP coin.

It does a good job at critiquing the XP movement (and agile), including some
of the examples from Kent Beck's Extreme Programming Explained, e.g. showing
how the XP/agile poster-project, the Chrysler C3 payroll system, failed.

It's focused on XP, but many of the points work for other agile methodologies.

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keyle
Agile - great if you're mostly seniors with experience, a good sense of time
management and communication.

Else run for the hills!

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jacquesm
No tool is 'bad' per se or 'good' per se, agile is not different in this
respect than a hammer or a compiler.

It's not a religion, try it see if you like it (or parts of it), discard it if
you don't perceive any benefit.

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singular
I'm not sure about that - a methodology necessarily makes assumptions about
what is important in running a software project.

If a methodology says that you must write everything down on cards and pair
program, etc. etc. as the fundamental basis of the approach, and that is
really ultimately counter-productive to the efficient running of a project,
then you could quite fairly describe the approach as 'bad', or at least
faulted.

It's a question of whether it helps or gets in the way.

Also, you can really only take good parts of it if the people executing it
don't start themselves seeing it as somewhat religious - if they feel we
should 'do agile' and that means following it as written down, then they're
unlikely to be open to cropping bad pieces off.

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jacquesm
It sounds as though you've already made up your mind ;)

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singular
Well, I'm certainly biased to think it a fad, yes, thanks to Stevey's post!

But I do wish to contend that a methodology _is not_ just a tool and
inevitably has some sort of a dogma attached to it, well it seems that way to
me anyway :-)

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jacquesm
It seems to me that way too. But I think that there are shops that get good
mileage out of agile, even if not for the reasons they think they are.

For the most part, agile shines if you had no organization in place at all,
then it is easy (low entry barrier) to get going and to see an immediate
improvement.

But when comparing agile to any other SDM it's just another tool in the box
and not spectacularly better or worse than any other.

