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0 pointsnescioquid3y ago0 comments

I think it really boils down to "use your best judgement", but people are usually uncomfortable with that.

In terms of theory for agile practice, one typically sees discussion of industrial control theory and analogies based on thermostatic controls, but it seems surface-deep to me.

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kelseyfrog3y ago· 1 in thread

If I'm being completely honest, the brevity of the Agile Manifesto is the root cause of cargo cult agile. By not resting on a solid theoretical or practical base, the result is practitioners who implement agile by asthetics. People who do agile without understanding its goals or which problems it attempts to solve create incoherent development systems that look like agile on the surface but introduce flaws that undermine the agile project. Surely, this should sound familiar.

nescioquidOP3y ago

> ...the brevity of the Agile Manifesto is the root cause of cargo cult agile.

I don't disagree with you, which is why I say that the manifesto is really just actually asking you to exercise your best judgement, given the set of values it proposes. The pragmatic attempts to provide a methodology only give you a list of "thou shalts" that remove the need for people to exercise best judgement in the first place (which is somewhat defeating).

There is some software engineering literature that attempts to provide a theoretical foundation, as I mentioned, but while interesting, I haven't found them terribly useful: people just want a list of commandments to follow.

Is that the manifesto's fault?

Personally, I think the manifesto is probably best used like a diagnostic check-list to understand how screwed up your current work context actually is.

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