I've always liked the Agile Manifesto, but it's fairly vague, and leaves a lot of details to be provided at implementation time.
I suspect that a lot of Agile is actually "agile™." A branding facade, over an unstructured, ad hoc development system. Not even Waterfall, which is actually a very robust system (just robustly inflexible, which often gives bad results).
I like the idea of evolutionary design, and adapting to change, but I have found that it needs to be done carefully, and that having experienced developers; concentrating on results, is a must.
As always, I think the proper answer is "It depends." The search for The One True Methodology is one that will never be satisfied. Even different projects, under a single organization, probably need to take different approaches.
I just believe that we always need to keep our eye on the end result, and all development needs to be done, with that in mind. I think that (for me), Agile is accepting that we don't actually know what "done" looks like, when we start, but we have to have a heuristic to help us to understand when we're done.
I suspect that a lot of Agile is actually "agile™." A branding facade, over an unstructured, ad hoc development system. Not even Waterfall, which is actually a very robust system (just robustly inflexible, which often gives bad results).
I like the idea of evolutionary design, and adapting to change, but I have found that it needs to be done carefully, and that having experienced developers; concentrating on results, is a must.
As always, I think the proper answer is "It depends." The search for The One True Methodology is one that will never be satisfied. Even different projects, under a single organization, probably need to take different approaches.
I just believe that we always need to keep our eye on the end result, and all development needs to be done, with that in mind. I think that (for me), Agile is accepting that we don't actually know what "done" looks like, when we start, but we have to have a heuristic to help us to understand when we're done.