the great pyramid of agile

[Daniel Barlow]

Pete Sergeant wrote:
> On Wed, Jun 06, 2007 at 11:32:54AM +0100, Pedro Figueiredo wrote:
>> http://worsethanfailure.com/Articles/The-Great-Pyramid-of-Agile.aspx
[...]
> I have come to love Agile for the protection it offers you, as a
> developer, against unreasonable technical and non-technical
> work-assigning resources.

I have read the article, and I can summarise as it as "dicking about
with methodologies is not helping us solve the real problem, which is
that too many developers are crap"

In this it kind of misses the point.  If your company can implement one
of these fancy agile methodologies it will have (good) effects on parts
of the company other than the development department: things like scope
negotiation (as in Pete's example) get a bit of structure to them and
everybody wins.  This means that you're more lilely to attract (and less
likely to piss off) whatever number of the vanishingly-small-percentage
of non-crap developers you can lay your hands on.

It's a bit like saying "comfortable chairs are not helping us solve the
real problem, which is that too many developers are crap".  Sure, but if
you try putting the department on cafeteria seats you're only adding
higher staff turnover to whatever problems you had already.  (Where the
analogy breaks down is that the cafeteria seats probably make *all* the
staff unhappy, whereas crap methodology probably annoys the good
developers disproportionately, because the bad ones don't care anyway)


-dan