> Agile is process, everything else is no process: Wait... what? How do you keep on arriving at that conclusion over and over again? And don't even think about saying "waterfall" because I swear to god, I'll punch my computer so hard it'll knock Google off the internet.
As far as I've been able to ascertain, in practice, "Agile" means "not waterfall". Fullstop. As in, any process that isn't waterfall, is called "an Agile process."
You can be "agile" by just goofing around with no big plan; if the work gets done, you can look back at the points where you made little plans, and say "well, see, we were doing Agile." Any [successful] process other than waterfall, when post-hoc analysis is applied to it, will look like the classic definiton of an "agile" process, no matter whether you were trying to execute capital-A-Agile at the time!
And I'm not saying that in the "the Agile people are right" sense. I'm saying it in the vacuous sense: that the term "Agile" is meaningless other than in that it means "not waterfall." Waterfall is doing design once, at the start of the process. If you ever do design again at any point, ever break your design up into pieces and postpone some of them, or design this feature at a separate point than that feature--then you're not doing waterfall. And so, the Agile people will say, you're "doing Agile." That's it. That's all they mean. You've designed more than once.
And your response should be "...so what?"
(But it should also be, in a more diplomatic sense, "well, then we're all doing Agile already anyway, aren't we? You've long won this Quixotic crusade against the Waterfall windmill; we all agree that 'Agile' (to this vacuous definition) is the right thing to do. Now let's all go out for a pint.")
As far as I've been able to ascertain, in practice, "Agile" means "not waterfall". Fullstop. As in, any process that isn't waterfall, is called "an Agile process."
You can be "agile" by just goofing around with no big plan; if the work gets done, you can look back at the points where you made little plans, and say "well, see, we were doing Agile." Any [successful] process other than waterfall, when post-hoc analysis is applied to it, will look like the classic definiton of an "agile" process, no matter whether you were trying to execute capital-A-Agile at the time!
And I'm not saying that in the "the Agile people are right" sense. I'm saying it in the vacuous sense: that the term "Agile" is meaningless other than in that it means "not waterfall." Waterfall is doing design once, at the start of the process. If you ever do design again at any point, ever break your design up into pieces and postpone some of them, or design this feature at a separate point than that feature--then you're not doing waterfall. And so, the Agile people will say, you're "doing Agile." That's it. That's all they mean. You've designed more than once.
And your response should be "...so what?"
(But it should also be, in a more diplomatic sense, "well, then we're all doing Agile already anyway, aren't we? You've long won this Quixotic crusade against the Waterfall windmill; we all agree that 'Agile' (to this vacuous definition) is the right thing to do. Now let's all go out for a pint.")