Many people jokingly refer to the “cult” of agile. But the reality is that to outsiders, many Agile teams, particularly those doing Scum, seem to have the messianic zeal of cult members. I think this is just fine, and really no different than the zeal you see from Ruby on Rails converts. These people are simply excited about having found something that really works for them, and they want to tell you about it. This becomes problematic when a dogma emerges – where you start to see semantic arguments which boil down to “I’m more agile than you because X.”
What I’ve seen this week at the Agile Development Methodologies conference is an underlying theme which more or less boils down to:
Agile = good, Dogmatic Agile = bad
Although this seems obvious, it’s the sort of thing that’s worth repeating because we are starting to see more people engage in “Are you Agile[tm] Enough” debates on blogs and forums. This is dogma rearing it’s ugly head. If you happen across these threads, ignore them – they are irrelevant at best and detrimental at worst. Quite simply they are missing the point. The successful groups realize that silver bullets do not exist – agile or otherwise. There simply is no methodology which works for all teams in all situations. The key is to apply the agile concepts to your situation. Try some techniques – keep what works, drop what does not. Inspect and Adapt. But just be sure to leave the dogma out of it!
