Fake or Real Agile?

Seems the last few days have been full of discussions about what is fake and what is real. A Facebook friend posted an image of a hunter, an elk and a cougar. Turns out it is fake. I read in the newspaper about how larger clothes manufacturers send “samples” of smaller companies collections as “inspiration” to off-shore manufacturers.

On You Tube, everything can be faked...

So, what does this have to do with Agile Software Development? (BTW, first check if you are agile.) Agile Software Development is a both a mind set and a set of practices. Following Agile practices does have a positive impact.

A colleague at Capgemini wrote that “You could be doing Scrum, writing SMART usecases, using continuous integration, writing automated tests, and not be agile at all.” He also wrote “agile software development is really not about software development. It doesn’t tell you how to test, it doesn’t tell you how to write down requirements, it doesn’t tell you how to design, it doesn’t tell you how to develop.”

Is it true that you can have the mind set and not do the practices or that the practices are useless if you do not have the mind set? Having the mind set and not doing the practices will be really hard. How can you possibly be Agile in your relation to the customer if your code base looks like a nest of spagethi so that re-factoring is more or less impossible? But I have seen many teams where they have “tried” to be agile and adopted many of the practices but not done them well. Because they did not have the mind set, they did not fully understand what they were supposed to do and which practices were more or less important.

I like to think of the mind set and principles as the trunk and the branches of a tree and the practices as the twigs and leaves.