Agile MYTHodology

The source of the title of this posting comes from a document that I was reviewing recently. The author was going on and on with buzzword-laden run-on sentences in which he proudly proclaimed how he had revolutionized development at a company through the application of ‘agile mythodology’. I laughed out loud and decided that typo was a keeper because it expresses some of my feelings about and experiences with agile.

Don’t get me wrong, I have seen agile work very, very well when it is used to structure the execution of the development phase and/or when agile design and modeling approaches are well understood and applied. Where agile absolutely falls apart is when it is twisted into the ‘I don’t have to design or document anything — I just make it up as I go along’ approach that many proponents advocate. Agile delivery is not a substitute for proper design and documentation. This is the mythology part: that you can create quality software by fiat. It is easy to pick out the agile mythologists; listen for their disdain for ‘architecture’ and ‘documentation’ and ‘standards’ while all the while no producing any acceptable code.

I recall being asked to do an architectural review of an ‘agile’ project. When I asked for the standard project documentation I got the asinine response: ‘The code is the most accurate documentation for the system’. Really. So show me in the code what the security requirements are and how they were approved by corporate security or where the scope and objectives are (and on and on). I wasn’t about to accept the ‘trust me I coded what the customer wanted; oh and by the way, you have no way of verifying that’ BS.

Agile-boy eventually came back with a link to a wiki (cus’ wikis’ is agile-cool) that had a handful of paragraphs on it and some links to a few UML diagrams (several of which had nothing to do with the project at hand — but I wasn’t supposed to be smart enough to figure that out). Needless to say the project was shaping up to be a disaster and was saved only when a proper design and more ‘traditional’ development approaches were hastily put into place.

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