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Comment by brikis98 | Hacker News Reader

> So, yeah, Agile requires safety; but, before that, it requires commitment.

Completely agreed. There are certainly tools and processes that are more effective than others (as I discussed in the post), but for a creative discipline like programming, no process or tool will be effective unless the creators (the programmers) buy into it. That reminds me of a quote from Peopleware:

> The maddening thing about most of our organizations is that they are only as good as the people who staff them. Wouldn't it be nice if we could get around that natural limit, and have good organizations even though they were staffed by mediocre or incompetent people? Nothing could be easier—all we need is (trumpet fanfare, please) a Methodology.

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Tellingly, the "high discipline methodologies"[1] page on c2 was kicked off by listing XP and the Personal Software Process.

(You can create systems for enabling median folk to accomplish things, even if they are disinterested. We call it "bureaucracy", and it sucks, but a lot of the time it kinda-sorta works. A bit.)

Anyway, as usual: you need good people, good process and good tools.

None of these are substitutable for the others, despite what methodologists, tool vendors and various worthies might tell you.

[1] http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?HighDisciplineMethodology

> (You can create systems for enabling median folk to accomplish things, even if they are disinterested. We call it "bureaucracy", and it sucks, but a lot of the time it kinda-sorta works. A bit.)

Yeah, it's true. And the kinda-sorta might be just enough to some companies (which are too big to fail and have enough leverage to push mediocre stuff to the market).

On a side note, I've been feeling, lately (and within the context of all this Agile BS my company tries to indoctrinate me with), that management is really the art of accomplishing stuff without making large assumptions about your resources (in software, without assuming any kind of talent, commitment or responsibility from the team). And, although it seems horrible to me, there's really a lot of knowledge and value in achieving things even when you only have a bunch of uncaring, undedicated and uncommitted monkeys which only care about collecting their paycheck.

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