Nate Duehr wrote:

> The fact that Agile exists doesn't bother me, it's the amount of uptake
> it has had in the industry -- a sure sign the software industry as a
> whole hasn't really grown up yet and started to do real engineering.

There are a few interesting ideas in the concept, and some of them can be
used in other contexts, also. 

But there's one core concept that IME is one of the reasons for failure of
the deal: frequent (and if needed deep) refactoring. Most programmers are
scared to death to refactor code they haven't written -- but yet, that's
one of the core necessities of Agile. Since there's not much architecture
laid out at the beginning, programmers have to correct the course quite
often -- which means quick and "agile" refactoring, often deep through the
whole system. 

Having this ability is a great asset, and training it is a /very/ good
thing IMO. But it's not easy to get a team of people who are all good at
this... both at doing it, and at judging when is the right time to do it.

Another problem with pure Agile is that IME it is a good thing to task
people with tasks that play to their strengths. Keeps them motivated, and
optimizes the results. This requires a certain amount of pre-planning and
pre-architecturing, and separating the project tasks into individuals'
tasks -- according to the individual strengths and weaknesses. That's kind
of difficult when attacking the thing in an Agile manner. 

Other difficulties come up when you have systems that are made up of very
different problem domains, and therefore are critical WRT the interfaces
between them: mechanic and electronic hardware, firmware, PC interface
software, or database backend, business layer, web server, browser
frontend. The middle layer people usually don't like it if they have to
rewrite code every other week because someone at the database backend
didn't plan ahead and changes the table structure according to the growing
needs every other week :)

Gerhard

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