Agile: Buzzword or Wisdom of the Ages?
It is a mistake to think that Agile is merely a project management methodology or worse, a buzzword.
Agile is a philosophy, a body of knowledge, an understanding, experience accumulated in the 20th century, distilled and discussed, and carried quite deliberately into the present. It is, in it’s small way, wisdom of the ages. Though it’s also a pendulum swing, away from heavyweight life cycle development process with lots of front-end planning , i.e. Waterfall, towards a lighter-weight process with less planning and more coding, and more interaction between the most important assets in software development: people.
I urge you to read about the Agile Manifesto, if you haven’t already, and review their twelve principles. In short:
- Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
- Working software over comprehensive documentation
- Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
- Responding to change over following a plan
I’ve begun a series of posts about agile development using .NET:
Test-driven Development in .NET
and some concerned opining: