Cabiritech

A few years ago I was lucky enough to be involved in a meeting with Scott Ambler, in which he opened my eyes to the Agile way. Since then I have been an ardent supporter of Agile processes.

From that point I have striven to run all my projects in an Agile manner, and have actively sought to work at companies which have an Agile development approach. However, I have started to see a disturbing trend amongst recruitment consultants about what Agile really is.

Wikipedia defines Agile as:

“..a group of software development methodologies that are based on similar principles.”

These principles include: frequent review and refactoring; teamwork; self-organisation; accountability; rapid delivery; and aligning the customer needs to the development goals.

The various Agile practices are: Test Driven Development (TDD); Business Collaboration, sometimes called Business Driven Development (BDD); Continuous Integration; Pair Programming; Task Management.

In the above I have not mentioned 2-week iterations, or daily stand-ups because these are both aspects of Scrum, and I think this is where the confusion happens.

There are various methodologies out there that can be considered Agile - Scrum and XP for example (note that RUP is not an Agile process) - and it seems to be that recruiters are given a checklist of what it is to be “Agile”. Most commonly the list seems aligned to Scrum, and all too commonly it appears that if you don’t check every box, then you haven’t been in an Agile environment.

I don’t think the blame lies wholly with the recruiters, we shouldn’t expect them to understand the minutia of every Agile methodology. However, we should try to moved away from the idea that Agile is a rigid set of all or nothing processes, it’s called Agile for a reason.