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Comment by bitwize | Hacker News Reader

Eric S. Raymond accurately characterized Agile when he described it as repackaging the things hackers do anyway, in a way that can be sold to non-hackers.

Maybe you don't want to be sold a product. You're not the target audience for Agile Methodology(tm). The MBA and Tim Robbins crowd are.

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The problem is it is packaging some of the things hackers do anyway.

When it's just something you do, it's fairly easy to see when it is or isn't appropriate to do.

When it's a package, it's invitation/excuse or requirement to always do it that way. And as the gp says, that's a problem.

So, this is what appealed to me about the XP/Agile/Whatever movement. It crystallized some of the things I already saw working into a framework that had some chance of making sense to the nontechnical people who would (IME) tend to freak out at some of the ways hackers work.

As with most religions, what might start out as a good idea (love one another, take your vitamins) can turn into a dogmatic religion once the zealots take over.

It's funny that you mention Tim Robbins because after listening to somebody talk for 30 minutes about the "values" of the agile process I felt like I'd just sat through a Robbins seminar. The harder somebody tries to convince me that they deeply, truly, personally care about their customer the more convinced I am that they're trying to sell me something.

I think you must mean Tony Robbins.

It's also an arguably necessary way to change processes in (largish) organizations who do not have good practices. Sometimes it's necessary to be a highly paid consultant to be taken seriously.

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