I recently ran across Bill Miller’s blog You Want IT When?. Bill has a lot of experience in managing software development, but in my opinion, he is way off the mark in his opinions on agile. Unfortunately, he makes a lot of claims that I’ve heard repeatedly from people who haven’t actually experienced agile or haven’t really understood its philosophical underpinnings.
Bill starts off by admitting that he’s only read about agile–which he clearly doesn’t see as a problem:
After reading many articles published by Agile proponents, I remain steadfast in my beliefs that something is wrong, and rather than advancing the state of the art practices in Software Development, Agile proponents are setting us back, and in this world where jobs easily cross international boarders, especially easy in software, we need practices that demonstrate the value proposition for keeping teams here in the US: practices that deliver reliably and predictibly [sic] on commitments and practices that can demonstrate improvements in productivity and quality.
In the next few posts, I’d like to address Bill’s criticms one by one.
UPDATE: Here are the follow-up entries that I’ve completed: