Ron Jeffries hit the nail on the head yesterday in his blog about Named Clouds. Ron tells us each of the named agile methods like Kanban, Scrum, and XP is like a Name Cloud. Over time these Name Clouds morph and change and run into each other so we're better off trying out the ideas than arguing over which is the best cloud.
Ron's the expert here. He's been in more of these named cloud debates than you or I have had hot breakfasts. The trouble is we want to spread new ideas and naming a cloud and gathering a band of people prepared to defend the ideas helps them spread. For example, the Kanban cloud had to form a passionate band of followers for the idea of limiting WIP to be taken seriously. These people generate the material such as books and presentations for the ideas to spread.
Hang on a minute. Wasn't the whole point of the Agile Manifesto to prevent infighting between the agile methods? Well, it does define a big fluffy cloud that everyone wants to be part of. But there's a lot of money to be made if you can bottle a cloud, slap a label on it, and sell it to people. The method camps haven't gone away.
There's also been some concern that it's too easy to stay on the edges of the big fluffy Agile cloud without getting the benefit. Brian Marick has even proposed an alternative named cloud with a more scary name Artisanal Retro-Futurism crossed with Team-Scale Anarcho-Syndicalism for people who are really serious about doing it without having to dumb it down.
Well folks, my experience is people on real projects will take what they want and discard the stuff that's not useful (or sometimes just too difficult). That's why I've been been talking about Generic Agile and Agile Mashups for a couple of years now. We've also taken this approach in our Agile Coaching book although we got comments from reviewers that what we wrote was not XP/Scum/Kanban enough which we decided to ignore.
What most people are interested in at work is not how Agile they are but how to solve the problems that they face. It helps to have some techniques to make plans and show progress but there's so much other stuff that Agile named clouds don't help with that they're always on the lookout for something more.
Recent Comments