Daily WTF on Agile
Alex over at the Daily WTF has a great article on Agile, contrasting it to both the Atkins (Fadkins 
) diet, and also the building of pyramids.
Many years back, I got hooked in to whole the Atkins Diet craze. And like most dieters, it didn’t work. I lost weight and slowly gained it back over the next few years. The reason that Atkins – and all the other fad diets – fail is because they try to avoid a simple, painful truth: short of altering body physiology, the only way to lose weight is to eat less and exercise more.
In the past decade or so, we’ve seen a lot of “fad development methodologies” crop up. In lieu of a standard Worse Than Failure article, I’d like to discuss the latest craze (well, for a few years now): Agile and its derivative methodologies. They all promise the same thing – cheaper, better software built faster – and they all generally fail to deliver. Like fad diets, these methodologies try to avoid a simple, painful truth: you have to know what to build before you can start building it.
I’ve been quite enjoying doing a more agile process (we base ours around scrum), but we are by no means agile purists – which may be why it’s working. Worth a read.
