The Agile Heretic — An Introduction
In the late 1990s, William Rowden and I were working in transportation engineering at at David Evans and Associates. We accepted a strange little project to write some software for our office in Temecula, California.
We had little time and a demanding client, so we began to use this new thing called Extreme Programming to create TreePro. TreePro became the base for us launching Gray Hill Solutions, a work-for-hire software company largely serving the public sector. It also became the start of a long term search on my part for the best ways to build working, responsibly designed software.
We started with agile when it was a young, boisterous frontier. Agile is older now. It is at a point where it is desperately looking for sharks to jump. False notions of scaling, hundreds of competing certifications, and clumsy definitions of both processes and roles have left Agile meaning either “scrum” or “everything nice”. Neither definition is helpful.
Over the next few months, I will be putting up my Agile Heretic series of videos that look at what Agile has become and suggest some mitigation for a variety of roadblocks we’ve put in our own way. My goal is to help Agile actually be agile.
I am certain that these posts will upset some people and inspire others. I would appreciate it if we could converse about these ideas in the comments of the posts so that people can see the differing opinions and find their own paths.
Videos in the Series:
The Series: Intro | Who is Agile For? | The Soul of Agile | What Agile is Not
