In his latest Agile Newsletter Scott Abmler writes:
A few months ago I attended a user group meeting and the person giving the presentation had some incredible insights into software development. After the presentation a bunch of us went out to a local pub where I had the opportunity to speak one-on-one with the presenter. I told him that his techniques, which had been proven in practice many times over, would be of great interest to the agile community and I invited him to share his ideas with the community. He snorted and said that he had tried to do exactly that, but had been all but banned from the discussion lists which he had joined. He said that he'd been treated so poorly by the "close-minded agilists" that he wasn't interested in even trying to get involved with us any more.
I myself have seen abhorrent behavior occur on several of our most popular discussion forums, conferences, and user group meetings. It seems that there are several "favorite whipping boys" that are commonly attacked on agile discussion lists, regardless of experience in those topics on the part of the discussers. I'm often astounded at how stupid and incompetent management is portrayed to be, ignoring the fact that these are often very intelligent people doing the best that they can in often less-than-ideal situations. Everyone knows that the Capability Maturity Model (CMM) is the root of all evil, even though some interesting work is being done in Agile CMM and in (egads!) an Agile Maturity Model itself. The Unified Process (UP) is also commonly attacked, regardless of the numerous case studies written about how it's been instantiated in an agile manner, not to mention freely available agile versions such as the Agile Unified Process (AUP), Open Unified Process (OpenUP), and Essential Unified Process (EssUP). A lot of people on the lists "just know" that quality assurance (QA) and data management (DM) groups within organizations are simply incapable of being effective members of agile teams. It seems to me that our community has many unwarranted prejudices, prejudices that could very likely turn potential converts away from agile software development.
Truth be told, I'm no saint; I've been known to give data professionals a relatively hard time (okay, a really hard time), but at least I make a conscious attempt to understand and present the philosophies and techniques of the traditional DM community in a fair light.
Full Article: An Agile New Year's Resolution for All of Us
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