XP Toronto - Last Meeting of 2007

XP toronto meeting last night was a nice cozy session with lighting talks on “Limitation of agile”. Mishkin Bertreig was talking about Agile limitations with some team dynamics. He was saying that agile is not good for individual heroes. I agree, with caution. It drives me nuts to see some religious agilists writing off not only cowboy developers but also technically competent performing professionals who are passionate about software but just aren’t much interested in talking about processes. And watch for your backbone pragmatic performing workhorse outshadowed by those long-winded agile talkers!

Alistair McKinnell presented the image of desert and made home a simple yet powerful point: agile represents a sweet spot where the software development flourishes the best. As it moves away from the sweet spot, it gets harder. But it doesn’t stop working, thought.

This point was lively illustrated by Michelle D'Souza, who shared challenges of applying agile to a dispersed open-source project.

Andrey Shulinski brought up his pain points of introducing agile to a legacy product development. There are technical pains and organizational pains. Michael Fether’s “Working Effectively with Legacy Code” covers well the technical challenges. Not much is written on organizational ones. But over past years I learned more then I care to admit on how to manage legacy project development. It is probably worth a book of materials & knowledge. Is there a demand out there? Should I start writing?