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Comment by theworld572 | Hacker News Reader

Another way in which agile is like religion: its evangelists always have a jargon-loaded answer to every possible criticism of it.

They really remind me of being a kid in Sunday school and asking the teacher questions like "but if god created all of us, who created god?" or "what if somebody was born and raised in the middle of the amazon and never even heard of Christianity - will he go to hell?". There was always some bizarre logic-twisting response to those questions which didn't really answer them but was enough to try and shut you up.

Similarly, if you say "Agile doesn't work because X" - they will say "thats not REAL Agile...". But if you say "Agile is dogmatic" they will say "Agile lets you do what you want, its not a dogmatic rule based approach".

So there is simultaneously one "real" way of doing Agile and also no real way because it is not dogmatic.

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You sure your not getting these answers from different people?

Someone new to agile might go on a scrum course and think this is the one way of doing agile.

People who've been around awhile know you have inspect and adapt your process to specific implementations. There is no agile 'process' for this reason. It's also the reason agile mostly relies on having good people who can inspect and adapt. Agile is basically means creating a process that has been shown empirically work in your situation.

Its true the examples I gave are probably a bit exaggerated but I think the general point still stands. I think you have even demonstrated that contradiction yourself although in a much more eloquent way?

If Agile lets you inspect and adapt freely, then at what point does Agile does stop being Agile?

When your forced to follow a specific process without any input. A lot companies are like that.

Getting good at agile means getting good at inspect and adapt.

I definitely fall strongly on the anti-dogmatic side.

Agile is built around the simple value proposition that shipping products earlier, more often, and with more direct feedback from customers creates better products. We might even call this "The Golden Rule" of Agile. (This certainly verges on being a philosophy.)

If you believe that, and always act in accordance with that idea, and your team and stakeholders and users do so as well, there's no need for dogma. You will deliver great products and life will be good.

But the sad truth is a significant fraction of people are skeptics and cynics and doggerels and hairsplitters and technocrats and incompetents and martinets and apathetics and fusspots; in simple terms, they're only human.

So instead of one Golden Rule we have law after law after law and with law comes lawyers on both sides (or pharisees if you like.)

But if you inspect and adapt according to the Golden Rule, you'll always be doing Agile because you focus on the outcome and not the process.

Either you ship or you don't. Either you add value or you don't. Either you talk to users or you dont.

I'm not trying to be antagonistic but you sound exactly like the religious people we're talking about. And your response still doesn't answer the question - at what point does Agile stop being Agile?

Are you saying that any team that "ships products earlier, more often, and with more direct feedback" is following Agile? If thats all that Agile is then why do we need whole books on Agile, coaches, training seminars etc. if it can be summed up in one short sentence?

EDIT: Your definitions is also a tautology - nobody is going to argue that you should ship products late and with little feedback from customers.

> at what point does Agile stop being Agile?

When you make it a procedure - especially when you make it a rigid one. "Let us take this rigid approach to become agile" is just as stupid as it sounds.

> nobody is going to argue that you should ship products late and with little feedback from customers.

No. But some approaches result in more customer feedback than others do. So in practice, people do in fact choose to ship with less customer feedback.

Similarly, if you say "Agile doesn't work because X" - they will say "thats not REAL Agile..."

The Tao which can be spoken is not the true Tao.

There was always some bizarre logic-twisting response to those questions which didn't really answer them but was enough to try and shut you up.

Look at the results. Follow the money.

So there is simultaneously one "real" way of doing Agile and also no real way because it is not dogmatic.

How about substitute "Agile" with "Jeet Kune Do?"

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