Silver Bullet Methodologies

I started working as a software developer in a C, C++ environment back in 1991. At the end of 1998 I made a career move towards the world of Quality Management in software engineering environments. At that time the Agile methodologies went public with XP at its frontline.

I remember Quality Week Europe 1999 where the first signs of this Agile movement appeared. At that time the subject of the day was all about CMM. XP was mainly seen as "extreme" and "not realistic", a brainfart that would soon be gone.

One year later at that same conference there were multiple sessions on XP and although there were still a lot of people sceptic about it, at least some of the XP concepts were accepted as "might bring added-value".

As the maturity of our industry is "rather" low, Quality management is almost automatically linked to "Change". The Agile movement, and Kent Beck's "Embrace Change" theme in particular, has been shaking the tree for the last 10 years.

As the Agile methodologies are rather shocking for the traditional/conservative European ICT community, they form an interesting playground when studying "Change". I've been reading most of the books that are published so far on the Agile methodologies, XP, ASD, SCRUM and their related practices, with as main points of interest "how is change introduced?" and "How to cope with the resistance to change?”

I do not believe in religious advocacy, in my opinion process fundamentalists - whether they are iterative or waterfall, process oriented or Agile driven - risk of being blinded by their faith. And although I feel great sympathy with the Agile movement, there are no silver bullets, a team needs the "processes" - sorry for the ugly word - that suits it fine, neither more nor less. I guess that's what the scrum guys mean with "self organizing".