On Stevey on Agile

The blogosphere is abuzz about Steve Yegge's condemnation of what he calls 'Bad Agile' (that is, agile anywhere except Google). Everyone has been contributing their two cents worth, and there have been some interesting responses. The best one I've seen so far comes from Jeff Atwood over at Coding Horror:

"The whole FogCreek/Google-Is-So-Totally-Awesome thing is an annoyance. But I have a deeper problem with this post. I think Steve's criticisms of agile are hysterical and misplaced; attacking Agile is a waste of time because most developers haven't even gotten there yet! The real enemy isn't Agile, it's Waterfall and Big Design Up Front. Even "bad" Agile is a huge quality of life improvement for developers stuck in the dark ages of BDUF. I know because I've been there."

This comes very close to hitting the focal point of this whole debate, I think. I've noticed a pattern in the high-profile bloggers/developers who've taken a very poor view of Agile: it seems that someone has tried to push a particular Agile methodology on them even though they had no pain for it to solve. It seems to me that Joel and Steve already have their own versions of agile development, and they are doing quite well with them. They didn't need XP, Scrum, or any other Agile methodology. So, naturally, they can't help but think Agile is a load of crap designed to make money for consultants.

Someone on the XP mailing list suggested that Steve just "doesn't get it". I disagree. I think he gets it. In fact, he gets it so well that he doesn't need our help. He's already agile. And that's great, even if he doesn't want to fly the (capital-A) Agile flag.

There are really two problems:

1) There are people in the Agile community so excited about their chosen methodology or approach that they start treating it like a Golden Hammer. This is not agile.

Not everyone who isn't doing Scrum/XP/Crystal/whatever is doing BDUF/Waterfall. There are lots of folks out there who are working in a agile way, but not practicing any given 'methodology'. For example, I would categorize the Eclipse Foundation as agile, but they don't use any spefic methodology; they use a mix of practices that works for them. If they are happy and successful, why push XP (or any other methodology) on them? Even if you sincerely believe XP will help them, pushing it on them is not only condescending, it's not agile!

2) Steve (and other people like him who are extremely effective with their natural agile approach) rails so strongly against Agile that he will scare everyone away from it, whether it would be useful to them or not. That's a shame. This is the point Jeff at Coding Horror makes, and I couldn't agree more.