Re: Looking for Agile Experience

I don't have the experience of an "official" Agile development project,
being done with a classic procedural language.

But... to add my 2 cents, "Agile" is more of a philosophy, or a way to
approach development.
It's not a technique or methodology. Scrum is a methodology, UML is a
technique.

Agile, evolved from the eXtreme Programming movement in the 90's
(Smalltalk, Kent Beck) is best described as: NOT waterfall.

The "agile" way to develop is to not plan ahead, create detailed designs
etc, but make little increments to the code; always have a working system
that can be showed to the customer, have constant or frequent interactions
with the customer, such that the product is complete as soon as the
customer says it's complete.

The main thing is to let the system itself be all there is, instead of
diagrams and documents and texts etc to show the customer what is going to
be built. But simply show the customer a working system, frequently,
whenever the customer wants, to get constant feedback.

So, apparantly, i've always developed the "agile" way, in smalltalk, or
RPG, or Java.

The most important thing of "agile", and also the one that's most
undervalued and mostly even completely neglected with "agile", especially
these days where you have the scrum consultants "hijacking" the "agile"
philosophy, but it is the most important thing, is to regularly "refactor"
the code, to keep it "healthy" so that the system keeps it's agility, i.e.
that it can be easiliy modified as the customer requests. If you don't do
this then you either get a code mess which is difficult/costly to manage,
and you loose the "agility" (but you get to keep the silly daily stand-up
meetings). The reason that it's neglected is that's it's too difficult. It
takes some craftmanship, which doesn't come with simply hiring scrum
consultants, but experience.

The best way to do agile, is to throw away all methodologies, scrum
consultants, etc, find a couple of really good developers (craftsman), and
just let them do their work. They will introduce just enough process
(planning, standards, documentation, etc) as is necessary. Simple,
actually, if you find them. But you probably won't find them, because your
scrum consultant won't tell you this, and instead - like any
"methodologist" - replaces craftsmanship with mediocre (cheap) coders, and
lots of process to *try* make up for it (not in costs that is).

My 2 cents.



On Tue, Oct 22, 2013 at 11:09 PM, Jon Paris <jon.paris@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>wrote:

Because the "Agile advisor" in place is insisting that only OO languages
can support Agile.

I'm looking for someone who can dispute this based on experience - not
theory - which is all I have.


On 2013-10-22, at 4:47 PM, David Gibbs <david@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On 10/22/2013 3:38 PM, Jon Paris wrote:

Anyone got any experience in applying Agile techniques in an ILE +
RPG environment?

We're doing scrum ... but I don't really see how programming language

enters into it.

david


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