It’s been a long time since I’ve had time to post anything. A lot has happened, most notably I moved house. How painful is that! Being offline for 2 whole days really hurt me. But I’m back with a fatter pipe providing me with copius amounts of bandwidth.
Anyway, during my downtime I read a great article by Alistair Cockburn on “Are iterations hazardous to your project?” And yet again Alistair is spot on. There are many nuggets in this paper but by far the one that rings home for me is the age old problem of clients not having the time to accept iteration deliverables. With no feedback, where’s the value. Agile development is about delivering value. If you are not doing that, you are doing iterative development NOT agile development.
Another funny thing Alistair alludes to is are the macho agilists. I’ve come across a number of these and I had to laugh out loud on the issue of iteration length. Alistair is spot on with macho agilists opting for very short iteration cycles. Don’t get me wrong, sometimes very short iterations are the right thing to do in certain contexts, but in others i’ve seen them used to by macho boys to demonstrate experience and knowledge over an unworthy (read as less experienced) agile opponents (read as team members) .
Anyway, I recommend taking 10 minutes out of your day to read this article…