Agile at the Chocolate Factory

I have been doing a lot of digging around software development methodologies lately, largely because I am about to embark on a project that requires much more overt risk management than I am used to so I need to get things in order.

So in the process of all of this I read with interest Steve Yegge’s article entitled ‘Good Agile, Bad Agile’. In the post he describes at great length how fantastic it is to work at Google. It sounds like the software version of Willie Wonka’s Chocolate Factory. He also writes off 99% of agile practice as guff. I’ve not worked in large teams that have employed agile or formal methodologies so I’m not really in a position to disagree from personal experience but during the course of my recent research it would appear that Steve ‘Umpa Lumpa’ Yegge is being a bit harsh.

An interesting counterpoint to Steve’s article is this recent set of survey results. Unfortunately I don’t see them as particularly useful argument fodder as the survey was sponsored by The Agile Alliance and conducted by VersionOne, an agile tool vendor. Shame that…

UPDATE: Roy Osherove has picked up on this article (Steve Yegge’s one, not mine) and is promising some further posts about it. As Roy has a good deal more experience of agile methodologies than I it will be interesting to see what he has to say. So has Rocky Lhotka if you want to get the other side of the coin.