Two Years Of Programmer Anarchy
the-arm.com
the-arm.com
Most of us have gone through the cycle of doing a strict Agile methodology (usually Scrum), followed by dropping much of the annoying rituals because things went so much smoother without them.
Only to discover that those rituals had actual purpose, and needed to be reintroduced in some (often somewhat less formal) form or the other.
And there is nothing wrong with that process, except the part where half way down the line people start writing blogs bitching about how Agile sucks, or worse, start proclaiming they invented the Next Big Thing(TM), in this case "Programmer Anarchy".
Ironically, the whole Programmer Anarchy paper starts with proclaiming that they still adhere to the Agile Manifesto, so where the fuck do they come off claiming that this is "post-Agile"?
We still only have three flavors for any project bigger than weekend hackathon (for which we use the well-known method "programming, motherfucker"): "waterfall", which is still perfectly fine if you're making software for nuclear powerplants or weapon systems, "agile" or total failure.
By all means, share your experience, but stop making claims like "X is dead" and "Y is the new silver bullet". Or just stop labeling it altogether.
The software business has problems that are not properly solved and we need to do work with that (create business value)
But it's even on heavy debate HOW to DO things (not (even) technologically)? And all fail(ed)/fails?
It sounded to me fresh and liberating, but I kind of suspected that it was more a honeypot for hackers than something that was really used.
And as at the after-party Fred was surrounded by a lot of people asking all kinds of questions not related to the topic of his speech, I didn't really manage to figure out what was the deal.
And frankly I didn't check it afterwards. Until now.