Welcome to another post in my “Death of agile” series. This post is an open letter to Chris Matts, the ‘father’ of Real Options and Feature Injection and co-parent of BDD.
See also:
Dear Chris,
I recently came across one of your blog posts inspired by some of the vendors you met at Agile 2013 in Nashville. You were clearly outraged by the SAFE family of products that claim to ‘scale agile’ despite the absence of any convincing case studies, and from this you extrapolated the demise of agile.
I’d like to ask you to think again. No matter what sphere of human endeavour you look at, there have always been people gullible enough to buy snake oil, silver bullets or Spanish prisoners. And wherever there is demand there will always be those willing to satisfy that demand, unscrupulously if necessary.
When Harry Lime killed and crippled many Viennese with his sale of black market penicillin, did it to discredit the efficacy of that medication? I don’t think it was Graham Greene’s intent we reach that conclusion. Likewise, I don’t think that the marketing of unvalidated development methods discredits agile approaches or equates to the “death of agile.”
Agile is a set of values and principles that guide our approach to delivering value to our customers. It is as valid today as it was at the beginning of the millennia and I believe that this is no time to start lamenting.
Cheers
Seb
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