Re: Agile coming to our shop (supposedly)

On Thu, Jul 19, 2018 at 10:52 PM, Dan <dan27649@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

I'm not sure where the impetus for trying to "implement" Agile is coming
from. This company has always treated IT as a liability.

It certainly smells like buzzword du jour to me. When grasping for
straws, grasp for the sexiest-sounding one.

And since Agile is often associated with "lean", I certainly can't
blame bean-counters for thinking that it might be a way to cut costs.

I am curious if there are any old-school iSeries shops with "heels dug in"
devs who have attempted to "implement" any part of the Agile philosophy,
and how that went.

Could you be more specific?

One of the reasons I don't like the term Agile is that, when taken in
a broad, philosophical sense, it is mostly vapid. The phrase
"implement any part of the Agile philosophy" to me sounds like it
would be satisfied by almost any programmer just going about their
business. Especially programmers in small shops where there's not
enough structure to be anything *but* Agile, at least to some degree.

When it comes to specific practices which are labeled as Agile, I find
it hard to understand them as a cohesive regimen that embodies and
promotes the fundamental Agile principles. I question whether some of
them are Agile at all, and I certainly don't believe that if you can
somehow manage to follow every single practice labeled as Agile, you
are then automatically following the Agile philosophy.

John Y.