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Comment by BurningFrog | Hacker News Reader

> "That wasn't true Agile" is starting to sound about as credible as "That wasn't true Communism."

The difference is that many people have worked on highly functional "real agile" teams and can tell the tale.

> Best methodology: Self-organizing teams of experienced, expert engineers.

Minor quibble: While that is of course the best scenario, it can also work quite well with a few experts guiding the less experienced. Pair programming works wonders here.

If your team is all inexperienced newbs, I don't know what can save your project :)

> Regardless of whatever that term originally meant, this is what it means now.

Perhaps. I have no interest in debating word definitions though.

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> The difference is that many people have worked on highly functional "real agile" teams and can tell the tale.

Sure, but is it really the "agility" or the people making the difference?

The highly functional teams I've worked on either ignored or satirized the elements of Agile development (e.g. the "story" format, story points, any sincere effort at estimation poker) to get out of those discussions as quickly as possible. This probably bears some similarity to how the original "Agile" developers dealt with the preceding methodologies.

Both these things are directly written in the Agile principles.

“Build projects around motivated individuals. Give them the environment and support they need, and trust them to get the job done.”

“At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly.”

So based on your description those teams were Agile in the sense meant by the manifesto.

You know, that is a fair point!

The great Agile teams I was on had really good people on them. So, sure, they might have done great work in other environments.

Then again, this was the methodology they chose.

It also sounds like the teams you describe picked their own way of developing, which, in a Big Picture sense, is all the Agile Manifesto says: Let the team control their own work, and get out of the way.

Which, in a lawyerly and annoying, but still kinda true way, makes that team agile too :)

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