Chapter 2: Agile Methodologies and Approaches
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Post - Agilism
Any successful movement will have some members who eventually move on to something else. In the
case of Agile methodologies, there is Post - Agilism. What is Post - Agilism? It ’ s a loose group of
developers and other IT professionals who have experience with Agile but have now moved on to other
approaches.The most thoughtful Post - Agilists (if they would allow themselves to be labeled as such, and even that is
up for grabs) make a fine distinction between being “ agile ” (defined as being adaptive in a social or
commercial circumstance) and being “ Agile ” (living by the rules, dogma, or inherited wisdom of a
particular Agile methodology, like Scrum or XP). It ’ s therefore possible to be “ agile ” without necessarily
having to take on all the trappings of any particular Agile approach.Of course, the way I am using “ agile ” and “ Agile ” here is merely to differentiate the concepts. Within
the Agile community and throughout this book, “ Agile ” is the way you see the word presented. There is
no formal distinction between “ Agile ” and “ agile. ”Another extremely valid concern brought up by Post - Agilists (again, please forgive the use of broad
labels) is that the Agile movement was once about shaking the industry out of the waterfall
methodology, the predictive mess to which everyone was so well accustomed. Now they feel that
everyone is trying to follow the Agile Manifesto (and other touchstone documents) as some kind of
canonical bible, replacing the earlier problem with a newer adherence - to - dogma problem.To be clear, any time that “ Agile ” is mentioned in this book, it is in the spirit of little - “ a ” “ agile. ” It is
more important for you, the developer, to be adaptive and successfully complete a project than to adhere
strictly to the rules of a certain methodology.Resources/Further Reading
Robert Wysocki has two books that include information on and examples of Agile methodologies:
Effective Project Management: Traditional, Adaptive, Extreme deals with the Adaptive Project
Framework and Extreme Project Management (in addition to traditional project management methods).
His other book, Effective Software Project Management, covers a lot of information. Part IV covers
the evolutionary development waterfall method, Scrum, Rational Unified Process, and Dynamic Sys-
tems Development as iterative software development project management strategies. Part V covers the
Adaptive Project Framework and other adaptive software development strategies. Part VI covers
INSPIRE and flexible model extreme strategies. If you want more information on Agile methodologies,
Wysocki’s books offer a wealth of information. Other good places to find information are at
http://www.agilealliance.com and http://www.agilemanifesto.org.