I first realized the problem when somebody hit me with:
"The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development
team is face-to-face conversation."
and
"Individuals and interactions over processes and tools"
to argue that writing code comments, tests and documentation wasnt worth investing in when we can all just talk.
This was after a series of disasters that code comments, tests and documentation would all have helped with. It's perhaps hard to imagine that this would be controversial but it was - the fact it was 10 years ago and we were under pressure to deliver can perhaps partly explain why.
Try as I might I couldnt argue that his interpretation was wrong. I stared at the words and was shocked when I realized that it was actually perfectly valid.
I have my own understanding of "good agile" and no doubt a lot of developers share it after many decades of good experiences and bad experiences and it arguably means putting processes and tools over individuals and interactions some of the time - like using a linter/autoformatter over arguing about formatting.
I dont know what we need but probably it looks a lot more like an updated version of the joel score than the vague soft focus angel tinged* crap that is the agile manifesto.
For what it's worth, I think your list is also a bit vague.
* I swear that the of the agile manifesto web design was also stolen from a baptist church.
The following on bit from those statements is:
“That is, while there is value in the items on
the right, we value the items on the left more.”
So your colleagues view was a pretty extreme one compared to the moderation shown there. But like any philosophy you end up with fundamentalists taking things too far even in the face of reality being more complex. It’s terrifyingly dogmatic to argue from scripture rather than pragmatics.
I dont think it was dogmatism. I think they genuinely didnt think we had time to write tests, etc. and when I argued that we should do it to be more "agile" because we'd all committed to being agile up front (in theory) they googled what the principles and said "look, thats not what agile says".
I agree that arguing from scripture is awful. I havent tried to do it since. I would like to see some other sort of anti-waterfall set of principles that I could get behind though.
"The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation."
and
"Individuals and interactions over processes and tools"
to argue that writing code comments, tests and documentation wasnt worth investing in when we can all just talk.
This was after a series of disasters that code comments, tests and documentation would all have helped with. It's perhaps hard to imagine that this would be controversial but it was - the fact it was 10 years ago and we were under pressure to deliver can perhaps partly explain why.
Try as I might I couldnt argue that his interpretation was wrong. I stared at the words and was shocked when I realized that it was actually perfectly valid.
I have my own understanding of "good agile" and no doubt a lot of developers share it after many decades of good experiences and bad experiences and it arguably means putting processes and tools over individuals and interactions some of the time - like using a linter/autoformatter over arguing about formatting.
I dont know what we need but probably it looks a lot more like an updated version of the joel score than the vague soft focus angel tinged* crap that is the agile manifesto.
For what it's worth, I think your list is also a bit vague.
* I swear that the of the agile manifesto web design was also stolen from a baptist church.