Agile | Feature Creeps
Thursday, July 29th, 2010
By pkatz
Agile. A simple word that brings up a lot of strong emotions and opinions across the game industry. Some people swear by it and fervently believe that it saved their project, studio, and/or marriage. Others think it’s a waste of time, energy, or worse. I believe it was Churchill who described Agile Development as “the worst form of software development except for all those others that have been tried”. What all these opinions don’t take into account is that Agile Development means different things to different people. More importantly, most of these different interpretations miss the entire point of being Agile.
Hated Agile Development
A quick Wikipedia search reveals at least half a dozen sets of Agile Development rules and methodologies. And to be clear, I’m not here to pick on any particular one: my words are aimed equally at Scrum, Kanban, Extreme Programming, DSDM, and your “Agile” method of choice. And I don’t have to dig into the intricacies and rules of each one in order to explain my point, because my point is that you aren’t really very Agile at all when you’re concerned about rules and structure.
The term “Agile” was coined in 2001, by a group of 17 developers gathered in The Lodge at Snowbird, Utah, for the purpose of combining their development theories. Their product, The Agile Manifesto, consists of four comparisons, explaining the sort of things they value. It is worth reproducing in its entirety here:
1: Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
2: Working software over comprehensive documentation
3: Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
4: Responding to change over following a plan
The Lodge at Snowbird
That’s it. That’s the entire document. That’s Agile. Everything else is noise.
So how did we get from there to here? How did those four phrases turn into the 120 page PowerPoint on “Best Scrum Practices” that I have in my desk, the dozens of books on Agile Management, and the 5000 word Wikipedia article explaining Extreme Programming? (Turns out, it involves less Mountain Dew than you might expect). How did we get from simple, idealistic principles on a ski vacation to mandatory bi-weekly Sprint Retrospectives? The answer is more straightforward than you might think: even the people who have embraced Agile don’t actually understand Agile. An “Agile Methodology”, kind of by definition, is an attempt to apply traditional development principles to Agile philosophy. Right there in the manifesto, it advises against processes, tools, and strict adherence to a plan. So why did we think it was a good idea to formulate processes and tools that would make us more Agile, and then enforce strict adherence to this…..
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