Improvise, Adapt, Overcome
Please, if you are a member of the Army Special Forces Green Beret, do not hate me nor my comment. I am not usurping your honor nor your motto. But my experience is truly embarrassing and failingly instructive.
About ten years ago I worked (as a consultant) at an online service corporation that suffered from a myriad of problems -- all of them streaming down (like the plumbers' bane) from above. After executive councils had deemed that neither bad product quality, nor failures in market research, nor lackluster sales campaigns, nor the decision to send technical support offshore, nor inattention to the customer could explain the current business environment nearly as well as a lack of motivation, the C-level announced a new internal motto.
Improvise. Adapt. Overcome.
They actually thought that using a motto on folks otherwise unfit for duty would magically transform them into a fighting unit.
In the same way, they introduced agile (through an expensive consultant) to the development teams. It failed for exactly the same reasons. Bringing an "adaptive" practice to undisciplined, unfit, and untrained programmers is the recipe for chaos, not victory.
When serendipity hands you superb coders and designers, it doesn't matter what "methodology" they are told to follow. They change the rules (at least internally) and figure out how to succeed. Agile is the shiny toy in the new box (or was ten years ago) and is still climbing the precipice from which it will eventually fall, but for now it is lofty. But the truth of battle and the truth of coding remain: warriors will win in battle, no matter what the motto; good coders will succeed in their development, no matter what the methodology.
Bad coders? Well, they fail no matter the best tools, best language (another argument), best practice, and best leadership.
Building software is the most egalitarian pursuit in the universe. The quality of the whole is never any better than the lowest capability of the worst developer on the team.
Methodology be damned.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
