TITLE: Wherefore Art Thou Agile?
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: November 04, 2009 7:33 PM
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In recent years, my favorite conference,
OOPSLA,
has been suffering a strange identity crisis. When
the conference began in the mid-1980s, object-oriented
programming was a relatively new idea, known to some
academics but unheard of by most in industry. By the
early 2000s, it had gone mainstream. Most developers
understands OOP now, or think they do. Our languages
and tools make it seem second nature. We teach it to
freshmen in many universities. Who needs a big conference
devoted to objects?
As I've written before, say,
here,
this reflects a fundamental misunderstanding about
OOPSLA has always been about. It's a natural
misunderstanding, given the name and the marketing
hype around it through the 1990s, but a misunderstanding
nonetheless. It's hard to unbrand a well-known
conference and re-brand it once its existing brand
loses its purpose or zip. So OOPSLA struggles a bit.
I hear that next year it will become one attraction
under the umbrella of a new event, "SPLASH". (More on
that later!)
In the last few years, people have begun to notice
something similar going on with a younger spinoff from
OOPSLA. Agile software development has started to
become mainstream. It is over the initial hump of
awareness and acceptance. Most everyone knows what
'agile' is, or thinks he does. Its practices have
begun to seep into a large number of software houses,
whether from Scrum or XP. Our languages and tools
now make it possible to work in shorter iterations
with continuous feedback and more confidence. We
teach it in universities, sometimes even to freshmen.
Agile has become old school.
Maybe I'm overstating things a bit, but the buzz has
certainly died off. Now we are more likely to hear
grumbling. I don't know that many people are asking
whether we need conferences devoted to agile approaches
yet. But I am starting to read articles that second
guess the "movement" and to see a lot of revisionist
history. Perhaps this is what happens when the
excitement of newness fades into the blandness of
same-old, same-old. The excitement passes, and people
begin to pay attention more to the chinks in the
armor than the strengths that gave the idea birth.
Let's not forget what made agile development and
especially XP so galvanizing.
William Caputo hasn't forgotten:
But why Agile sells isn't why I liked it. I liked
it *because* it put the programmer at the center
of the effort of programming (crazy notion that),
I didn't need the manifesto to tell me that I had
to find ways to make the person paying the money
delighted with my efforts, what I needed was a way
to tell them that I would gladly do so, if they
would just let me.
(The asterisks are his. The bold is mine.)
This is what made XP and the other agile approaches
so very important. Focusing on the buyers' needs
is easy to do. They pay for software and so have
an opportunity to affect strongly the nature of
software development. What was missing pre-agile
was attention to the developer. I still
prefer the term "programmer", with all it implies.
It was easy to find ways in which programmers were
marginalized, buried beneath processes, documentation,
and tools that seemed primarily to serve purposes
other than to trust and help programmers to make
great software.
The agile movement helped to change that, to shift
the perspective from inhuman processes that expected
the worst from programmers to practices that celebrate
programmers and their love for making software.
That some people are now even talking about restating
the Agile Manifesto's values toward maximizing
shareholder value is a tribute to agile's success at
changing the overarching story of the industry.
All this reminds me of an essay by Brian Marick on
ease and joy.
Agile is about joy at work. We programmers love to
make software -- software that improves the lives of
its users. Great software. Let us love writing
programs, and we can do great things for you.
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