
The Elephants in the Agile Room - DanielRibeiro
http://pkruchten.wordpress.com/2011/02/13/the-elephants-in-the-agile-room/
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ericHosick
A lot of "Elephants" were brought up in this. I'll just cover one: 7. Politics
- A more systematic and thorough acknowledgment that organizational politics
play a big role.

Agile accepts that there are politics and does acknowledge this. Agile can't
fix politics any more than it can fix needing locks on doors. But, it does
make it a lot harder to play politics by requiring a lot of transparency in
the process and requiring people involved to play very specific and well
defined "roles" just to name two.

With Agile, organization politics do come to light a lot faster. In my opinion
this is good.

Agile does not, nor should it try to, fix the problems brought to light.

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Isamu
A watershed moment? I hope we can get some better/more research on what works,
why, and under what conditions.

Good to see more honesty breaking out.

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arkitaip
I would like to suggest that a good software development methodology is one
that clearly defines the conditions when it should not be used, sorta like
Popper's concept of falsifiability. This based on my experience that there
simply is no methodology that works for all development projects regardless of
complexity, team size, resources available, etc.

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InclinedPlane
Quite so. Software is enormously varied in size, scope, and character, as are
software development efforts. The idea that there is some one size fits all
methodology is fairly ridiculous.

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jarnold
I was involved in that community for a few years. (As part of my job -- the
business side it Agile.) Ultimately, I got tired of the politics of ideas,
organization and labels.

What is still fun for me is trying out experiments, learning from them.
Reading about others trials in how to organize teams, programming practices
and deliver as much value as possible. Keeping track of elephants like these
was distracting.

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StudyAnimal
Most of those elephants are continually hot topics in mailing lists, the
blogosphere, and twitter.

It is a sign of a healthy community.

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jacques_chester
Wait wait wait.

Agile was hyped to high heaven, and now its founders and promoters are worried
that criticism might be over-stated?

When you make bold claims, people react energetically. Some people will be the
old order (per Machiavelli) and some will be natural contrarians. This doesn't
mean they're wrong.

The more you push your position, the bigger the backlash.

When fertilising the fields of marketing, don't be surprised to find weeds
thriving.

