I have been found of calling Agile, “only a vocabulary” for quite sometime. As most of my colleagues on the projects I have work on for the last couple of years seem to use an impressive blend of Agile terms, but somehow we never seem to be doing actual Agile development. I know there is a lot of nuance out there between the different Agile methodologies. I am not trying to get caught in that trap. I am taking the simplest broadest definition of Agile I have. Which to me basically comes down to, feature based iterative development, where new working-fully-tested (shippable) code is ready for release at the each iteration.
Yet, I continue to work on countless iterations that don’t even cycle through QA. Or the funniest case to me, ‘sprints’, that are dedicated to requirements gathering for the whole development team. As far as I am concerned, if you are not producing releasable code every single iteration, then you aren’t doing Agile development. I have no idea how that fits with my other post on Agile this week, but I will say that I am addressing two different extremes of the problem. In this case, I am talking about teams with no barriers to doing actual Agile development, but for some reason cannot seem to understand what Agile actually looks like.
I realize in one way it doesn’t matter, but for some reason I just take issue with our tendency to adapt our current habits to new vocabulary to allow us to keep making the same old mistakes…
