There’s a brilliant post by Peter Gillard-Moss answering James Shore’s post on The Decline and Fall of Agile and others.
It’s a bit long, but worthwhile. He goes through the process of analyzing of agile, and comes to the conclusion:
Nothing’s changed, agile or not. The majority of the industry still doesn’t value the basic, fundamental skills it takes to write software of acceptable quality. It didn’t before and it still doesn’t now. Instead it’s obsessed with solving the problem by bringing in the right highly paid manager with the right powerpoint presented methodology. Until the industry gets that ain’t the way it will drag every shining beacon of light (agile, Ruby whatever) down into Hades with it.
It’s all about expecting to find the silver bullet. And it has to be fast. But there is no quick way. And the road is tough. People are not born with it, we have to work hard and make mistakes on the way:
Developers who have never come across TDD before, who’ve never experienced it’s value first hand, who’ve spent years doing things a certain way are struggling to grasp the concept and oh sorry that’s surprising why? I guess you were doing TDD from that first Hello World in Pascal?
So how do we do it? By succeeding, step by step:
By being successful and then telling people about why and how we were successful. That’s how this whole agile thing started, that’s how it built up it’s great reputation and that’s how it’s going to survive and get better.
I believe agile is going to succeed. It may not be that fast, but it will prevail, because success speaks for itself. Where do you stand on this big issue?
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Agile, Test Driven Development , Unit Testing, mocking, Software Testing
