We accept many things a priori
Goal setting for example: my twin brother & I decide over a pint that we both need to lose weight. I (Leisure Larry) start eating better, exercise a lot more, drink fewer pints. My neighbor (Donny Disciplined) goes with an elaborate plan to lose X by date Y, and 2X by Y+7, etc. Who ends up losing more weight? Conventional wisdom says that Donny bests me in terms of both weight and time, but has anyone done the controlled experiment? What if his goal was too low, and I exceed it for not having set one at all?
The goal of agility after all is not to build software more cheaply, or produce software of higher quality as the article seems to imply. It is simply to adapt to a world in which requirements change more quickly than software can be developed using prior (e.g. waterfall) methodologies. Given perfect requirements you can build higher quality software more cheaply using waterfall than agile. I was surprised to hear none other than Allistair Cockburn admit as much a year or so back at a Groupon lunch & learn (Geekfest). Good luck getting perfect requirements.
I'm old enough to remember waterfall, and UUP (nee RUP) with it's 125 pre-coding artifacts, and a number of other pre-agile methodologies, but have been working with agile teams (various flavors) for a good dozen years or so, and for most projects I would refuse to go back. It's not perfect, it can be light on design & documentation, but you deliver something sooner rather than later, and the something ends up being more useful to more users, in my experience.
I don't need a controlled study to prove it to me.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
