| Title: | Good Agile, Bad Agile |
| URL: | http://www.rimmkaufman.com/rkgblog/2006/10/07/good-agile-bad-agile/ |
| Printed: | October 7, 2008 |
| Source: | The Rimm-Kaufman Group Blog, info@rimmkaufman.com |
- October 7, 2006
- 1 comment
I’m experiencing the Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon: after reading Extreme Programming Refactored, I’m suddenly tripping over all sorts of agile-bashing posts across the blogosphere. Two particularly thoughtful ones from Steve Yegge: Good Agile, Bad Agile and Egomania Itself.
Relevance to online retail?
One. Yegge’s Good-Bad post offers an peek into Google’s “unstructured” engineering culture. It’s an interesting backstory to this week’s announcement after the Zeitgeist about Google’s intent to simplify and integrate their products.
Two. Nearly every online retail CMO I know is IT constrained. Badly. “Can’t add this site feature yet, no IT resources.” “Can’t support that marketing channel, no IT resources.” Familiar refrains.
While there’s no perfect software development methodology, if adopting a better approach could offer even a slight improvement in an IT project’s likelihood of success and/or speed, that could be important to online retailers.
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I don’t believe that any kind of methodology will greatly help item two on your list. For some very structurally backwards shops XP, to use an example, may propel them greatly fowards in terms of efficiency. But I have yet to see an IT shop that is not completely innundated with good, or great, items on its work load.
The interesting thing, is that most of the time, the really good ideas get programmer time. The bad ideas die on the vine.
Cheers.