FrAgile Development

It's not often that a post comes along that sums up the general Zeitgeist of my world view, but James Shore has managed it with the decline and fall of agile. It seems that everyone, and I mean *everyone*, is now agile.

Or not.

In light of this bright new wave of software evangelists, each and every one foraging for continuous improvement in their tools and techniques, the term "agile" seems hopelessly out of touch. Thus, I'd like to be bold enough that I've identified the existence of (and therefore copyrighted as of now) a bold new software methodology... FrAgile.

FrAgile teams have seen the success/fashionable agile techniques and have decided that it's what they want to do. A good start, until the hard reality kicks in.

Excellent examples of FrAgile teams include those that:

- have short iterations but only release every 6 months (long customer feedback cycle)
- defer risk until late in the delivery cycle (ie. the hard stuff)
- mandate high test coverage without driving development through tests
- collect technical debt, but are "too busy" to pay it back (this applies to all aspects of the dev cycle: production and test code, build and deployment)

Of course, they're all bad ideas and maybe they just need a group hug and a cattleprod in the right direction. Let me just say this, however...

Duh.

Expect to be buying my book on this exciting new development methodology in due course.