Nice observation that organizations are simply taking the old command and control and factory mentality and trying to make Agile fit into it. But, of course, it's not vague "organizations" that do this, it's all of us. As technical people, we naturally drift towards wanting to define more and more exactly what something is -- we want to program the people. We think that by continuing to define exactly what is agile that we're helping more than harming.
I also take issue with the discussion at the beginning that pits "Software Engineering" versus Agile. This is broilerplate agilista bullshit. If you're converting a conversation into something useful you're using Engineering techniques. That's the whole definition of Engineering - moving from spec to value in some kind of organized way. And that way can be formal, informal, conversation-based, etc. Duh. Now what you might think of as heavy engineering is a different subject -- but those are just deployed flavors, not the true thing. You can't argue that agile is cool but the way organizations are doing it suck without (hopefully) realizing that software engineering is also cool but just done in a really sucky way at times by those same organizations. It's the same difference. So I think making this false choice shows a real immaturity/lack of deep applied knowledge on the part of the presenter.
Maybe it's just me, but I'm also getting tired of seeing that same old manifesto crap with every agile presentation I see. It's not the Ten Commandments. Get over it. If you're spending 60 slides to explain what agile is, then that's your presentation topic, not how agile is being applied. I guess I liked the conclusion but thought the build-up was overly done.
Nice observation that organizations are simply taking the old command and control and factory mentality and trying to make Agile fit into it. But, of course, it's not vague "organizations" that do this, it's all of us. As technical people, we naturally drift towards wanting to define more and more exactly what something is -- we want to program the people. We think that by continuing to define exactly what is agile that we're helping more than harming.
I also take issue with the discussion at the beginning that pits "Software Engineering" versus Agile. This is broilerplate agilista bullshit. If you're converting a conversation into something useful you're using Engineering techniques. That's the whole definition of Engineering - moving from spec to value in some kind of organized way. And that way can be formal, informal, conversation-based, etc. Duh. Now what you might think of as heavy engineering is a different subject -- but those are just deployed flavors, not the true thing. You can't argue that agile is cool but the way organizations are doing it suck without (hopefully) realizing that software engineering is also cool but just done in a really sucky way at times by those same organizations. It's the same difference. So I think making this false choice shows a real immaturity/lack of deep applied knowledge on the part of the presenter.
Maybe it's just me, but I'm also getting tired of seeing that same old manifesto crap with every agile presentation I see. It's not the Ten Commandments. Get over it. If you're spending 60 slides to explain what agile is, then that's your presentation topic, not how agile is being applied. I guess I liked the conclusion but thought the build-up was overly done.
Overall it was worthwhile to see.