Naked Agile: The true essence of Agile without the process crap (ceremony and dogmatism)!

For the last couple of years, I’ve this growing feeling that Agile is loosing its meaning and essence. As Agile goes main stream; the late comers are exposed to more and more ceremony in the name of Agile. IMHO this does more harm than good. There are lot of practices that the trailblazers have moved away from. They used them as a starting point but by now a lot of them have evolved from there.

Personally I’ve been executing projects quite differently. When I think about the various things we are doing, they don’t quite fit what the books or the standard training courses are talking about. In fact in some cases it contradicts them. Interestingly, I see a few folks executing projects similar to my style. There is certainly some common patterns out there.

Then the question comes, do new comers really have to go through the same evolution process to understand and appreciate Agile? Or can they skip some of ancient practices & concepts and jump start with what we collectively believe is the most suitable now? How do we package these evolved concepts and patterns?

Just so that I can differentiate it from the rest, I prefer calling it “Naked Agile”. The true essence of Agile without the process crap (ceremony and dogmatism).

Following are some of the things that I’ve been thinking/practicing:

• The Bloat Effect – Why Agile is not helping you any more?
• Iterations and Time-boxes are high ceremony
• Cease Inspection; Who needs a separate QA Team
• Requirements Considered Harmful
• Estimations Considered Harmful
• Projecting Velocity is Useless
• Simple Design; Yes Simple not Simply Design & Coding is NOT Programming
• TDD is not about Testing & TDD is not limited to Unit-tests
• Self-Organized Teams; Stop your bloody lip-service
• Agile != Rapid Software Development; Embrace Simplicity (Art of maximizing work not done).
• Scrum Master; the new Silver Bullet: Don’t fall prey for such gimmicks

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 17th, 2009 at 11:51 am and is filed under Agile. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.