Agile and Common Sense

Posted by Rich Crowley in Agile, common sense

Agile is hard. Agile is mistaken for a silver bullet. This is a great blog post.

There is a fair degree of common sense in both these statements. I love common sense. I love it even more when it gets applied to the process of software development in companies. As a PM who made his PM bones using predominantly (but not exclusively) PMBOK-based methodologies, Agile-based approaches worry me only in that they appear to be driven more as a reaction to negative experiences with existing software development approaches than based on a solid understanding of Agile, a comparison of it to these existing methodologies and a conscious decision at senior management levels that the Agile way is a better way and worth making a change for.

I’m all for Agile. I love many of the central tenets of the manifesto and I’ve got the scars where other methodologies (read Waterfall) actually helped projects fail. I’m also all for speed because the pace of business is very quick and often there isn’t time to do something as significant as swap methodologies in a wonderfully slow and methodical way. However, common sense tells me that moving to Agile in a reactionary fashion will result in pain more often than it needs to. Somewhere, somehow, there is an element of common sense that is critical to each organizations’ move to Agile that will dictate how well they pull it off.