Programmers are passionate about which development methodology is the best. Is it Agile? Waterfall? Feature Driven Development? Scrum? So everyone took notice when one of the 17 original signers of the seminal Agile Manifestowrote a blog post last month headlined “Developers Should Abandon Agile.”
Further down in his post, 78-year-old Ron Jeffries made a clear distinction between Manifesto Agile — “the core ideas from the Manifesto, in which I still believe” — and its usurping follower, “Faux Agile” (or, in extreme cases, “Dark Agile”). Jeffries ultimately urged developers to learn useful development methods — including but not limited to Extreme Programming — that are true to the Manifesto’s original principles, while also detaching their thinking from particular methodologies with an Agile name.
His blog post advocates a world where developers produce running, tested, working, integrated software at shorter and shorter intervals, and designing clean software that avoids complexity and “cruft” by constantly and consistently refactoring code. Managers and product leaders could then always be referred to the software’s latest increment, cultivating a collaborative approach which just might change management’s focus from “do all this” to “do this next.”
Read more at The New Stack
