All or Nothing
There’s quite a debate going on in the agile community over Jim Shore’s “The Decline and Fall of Agile” blog post. If you missed it, Mike Bria’s “Adopting the Whole Enchilada” over at InfoQ (http://www.infoq.com/news/2009/02/whole-enchilada-and-context) will catch you up to speed, from the original post to the heated posts it’s inspired. At issue in Shore’s original article is how agile could die out if organizations continue to simply “say” they’re practicing agile, without actually walking the walk. For the most part, the agile elite have come out in droves to agree with and elaborate upon his position. Martin Fowler posits that agile methodologies often give short shrift to the technical side of things. Industrial Logic and IXP founder Joshua Kerievsky suggests the problem is how organizations adopt agile, stressing that companies should become completely agile from the get-go. And Ron Jeffries puts the whole discussion in perspective, explaining that agile processes aren’t to blame, but the organizations that insist certain aspects of agile won’t work there.
For those of you who have been following this, what’s your take? Are agile’s shortcomings inherent to the methodology? (I don’t think so.) Or is it the “context”—i.e. the organizational milieu—that’s to blame? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comment section.