> The permanent brain damage of that CMM training course makes me admire XP.
OK. This article espouses XP as a religion. What irritates me is that implies an all-or-nothing approach of XP. You want floormats with that car? Pair programming with iterations etc. Which can be too much to handle - just adopting some of the XP principles and practices can make a big difference - stand-up meetings for example. I worked on a project that just started having stand-up meetings - to replace the once-weekly meeting where we would all either just fume at each other or silently say nothing. Communication improved to a point where we realized there was no real communication going on before (e.g. this is how I feel with X task)
That being said. Is Agile better? I don't know. I'm working on an Agile project right now - I hate the burndowns, hate them with a passion - reducing your accountability to a number. But what it does - updating burndowns is it makes your progress transparent - to you as well as the other people on the team.
Haha, as a PM I've found engineers hate burndowns with an absolute passion. And so do I. But you're right - the transparency makes it worth it. I try to make sure I gather the data in an unobtrusive manner as possible, and keep irritating meetings to a minimum. No matter what I do it still gives people the irrits. Having worked as a software engineer, I wish some of them would work as a PM for a bit to know what we go through as well...
OK. This article espouses XP as a religion. What irritates me is that implies an all-or-nothing approach of XP. You want floormats with that car? Pair programming with iterations etc. Which can be too much to handle - just adopting some of the XP principles and practices can make a big difference - stand-up meetings for example. I worked on a project that just started having stand-up meetings - to replace the once-weekly meeting where we would all either just fume at each other or silently say nothing. Communication improved to a point where we realized there was no real communication going on before (e.g. this is how I feel with X task)
That being said. Is Agile better? I don't know. I'm working on an Agile project right now - I hate the burndowns, hate them with a passion - reducing your accountability to a number. But what it does - updating burndowns is it makes your progress transparent - to you as well as the other people on the team.