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Showing posts from June, 2009

Agile is Dead. Long live Agile!

It seems that right now "agile" is flavour of the month everywhere.It has hit the mainstream. Everyone has it on their CV, too, so we have a situation where the industry want the skills, and everyone has the skills. Everything is fine and dandy in the software industry. Right? Dead wrong. There is a disturbing trend appearing in the industry. It is becoming increasingly difficult to identify anyone who has genuine agile experience. Many developers, BAs, QAs and product owners declaring agile experience on their CVs, when put into a true agile/lean environment struggle to cope (to say the least). To give typical examples, consider the developer who claims "agile" experience, but does not understand (let alone able to write) unit tests or the power of automated build systems. Or the "experienced agile" guy who had a Gantt chart showing the story contents of every iteration. Or the teams who believe it is acceptable to leave the build broken for weeks on end