One of my favorite movie scenes is from Man on Fire, actually Denzel Washington one of my favorite actors too.
| Bad Cop: | I’m really sorry for the girl. It was just business, you know?I’m a professional
|
| Denzel: | That’s what everyone keeps saying.
I’m Just Professional. Everybody keeps saying that to me. I’m Just Professional. I’m Just Professional. I’m getting sick and tired of hearing it. Do you understand me? |
This is exactly what is happened to me.
Everyone I meet keeps saying:
I am just Agile
I am just Agile
I am just Agile
I am just Agile
I’m getting sick and tired of hearing it. Do you understand me?
The story begin when I start working as a Senior Developer and Team Leader, every company I work for they said they are working with Agile and specially Scrum and they have a Stand-up meeting, Iteration delivery , and many other nouns and names. WOW they are really Agile !!
In the first company that working with Agile I didn’t know Agile well so I believe the company and I was very excited to learn how the real Agile is working and of course I was very happy.
After while and after I start reading about Agile I just realize the truth, they don’t even know what is the Agile is at all and they Don’t Want to.
I try to tell them about Unit Testing, TDD (Test Driven Development) or even Build Automation, or even well define Product Backlog or Burn-Down Chart but they don’t agree and consider all these as options.
Their answer and explanation are very simple…………..
We are customizing the Agile stupid!!!!!
What kind of customization you are doing?????
Poor M.Radwan he is not flexible at all !!!!
So now we don’t work with traditional style or even Agile because we don’t have well define requirements or process and we don’t apply the main basics of the Agile that help us working as Agile.
I start contact friends in other companies and told them about my story and it was a big surprise for me !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
They are the same !!!!!!!!!!
The problem that now we having this knowledge, so people there, talk to each other and they start believing their lies, developers moving from company to company to find the new company working with the same style of the Agile, so our conceptual idea of Agile is corrupted and spread to many companies (95%) the rest (5%) I didn’t see them but I guess they maybe there.
So whenever I explain the idea to them, they consider my idea is the perfect world and ideal and not be applicable at all, and I am just another freak !!!!
This why I choose the topic of my Thesis for my M.Sc. to be How To Transition To Agile and how to help companies and people doing the best practices of the Agile and of course TFS and VS ALM is my Tool for well applying Agile Development.
Business owners need to see “measured” results (successful project, less money, less time). And actually, there are few real agile projects that showed these measured results to business owners. This is the case inside and outside Egypt. If you can count, 10, 20 or even 500 successful agile projects, that wouldn’t be enough compared to non-agile projects that are successful (from business owners point of view).
It’s our responsibility (agile fans) to provide successful Agile projects to the market. Its success should be well documented, well understood, and well measured by business owners.
This way, and only this way, we can force the companies to adopt the real agile. If we can’t do this, we’ll be just rotating in a closed circle, we want to apply real agile, and companies insist to apply their own agile, we aren’t able to convince them, and they aren’t able to convince us, in an endless scenario.
My best wishes.
You are completely right, but what I am talking about here, people go for Agile because it’s less comprehensive but they are NOT AGILE, so I prefer if they work using other approach but they refuse, so they are not Agile and they are not traditional either, and this our problem, we take the name of the Agile, so they just apply Agile because it very easy to start developing software without having well define requirements, without having restricted process and many other features of less restriction and they leave why they can do that.