Be agile about agile!

The democrats and republicans are doing a fine job of "fire-bombing" the centrists in both their parties (I grabbed that quote from an article "It's not easy being George" in this month’s Vanity Fair). And, as I scan the agile groups and blogosphere, it seems the methodologists are doing it as well. Some of us take the "extreme" in extreme programming too literally, and others are holding on to some of agile developments long disproved stigma for far too long.

My approach always has been (and hopefully always will be, unless of course I turn out like my father, which all of us eventually do...) a pragmatic one. There are many things I love about Scrum and agile - driving elaboration and development off the backlog, test-driven development, burndown charts, and much more. And there are a some that I could do without (self-organizing teams, developers and testers are interchangeable, ... I blog on these later).

An agile approach needs to be tailored to your people, process and technology. You can start-off "by the book" but be sure to incrementally adjust your process in the same way you incrementally modify your products under development. If you have a particularly gnarly architectural component to build, feel free to build a UML-based design first. It’s okay. Really! These are just items that are added to the sprint backlog and monitored alongside all of the other demand that flows through the process. And God forbid you build a Gantt chart to model out some complex project dependencies. How will you be able to look yourself in the mirror?

Come on now; let’s be agile about agile and use the tool that works best for the job at hand.