Monday, August 27, 2007

"Agile" certification

Well, I guess it's the normal thing to happen, when things get mainstream, the temptation for people to "milk the cow until it drops" is stronger than the principles they used to defend. When I see what is happening around the "certification tracks" that are developed around Scrum, I must say I get mixed feelings about it.
More or less 10 years ago, when Scrum went public next to Crystal Clear, ASD, DSDM all in the shadow of the extreme XP, to me it was one of the more pragmatic flavours of the agile movement that was taking off. In contradiction to the black-and-white take-it-our-leave-it gospels of XP, it was bringing a clear message with the focus on the project management aspects of running a software development project. When looking at what is happening today, XP practices like TDD, pair programming, refactoring, continual integration, ... have become a commodity to modern software teams that take their job serious. The "extreme" aspects have disappeared (although there will always people who love to go for religious wars). I have the impression that the Scrum guys just go the opposite way. They try to score by shocking the people they should try to convince. You can discuss about style, and when looking at the effect XP had on the software engineering community, why wouldn't is work once again for the project management community?
It brings me back to the point I want to raise here. Is commerciallizing these agile ideas embedded in methodologies like Scrum the best way to bring the intended change. From what I hear from peers in my network, they are not really happy about it. Although we do not deny that Mike and Ken earn some return on investment on what they brought to the SE community. Still many people get the feeling, that money has become a bigger driver than the principles of the Agile manifesto.
What was fundamentally different between the agilists and the previous generation of methodologists is the fact that although these gurus all came with their personal flavour of implementation, they all subscribed the same basic priciples. But do the current practices of expensive certification tracks match with the open-source philosophy that turned the agile movement into a success? Eventually, what will be the difference between the more rigid methodology tracks like RUP & PMI which live on commercialization versus the agile practices and Scrum.
I do see the advantage of this commercialization as it will help agile practices entering into the more concervative type of software organizations, as to them something only has street credibility when expensive training and certification programs are required. But will it change them into agile organizations ... I'm pretty sceptic about it. Going agile is a paradigm shift, it's not something you do by following a training or passing an exam. It's something between the ears of people and no certificate will help making that switch ... it only helps upgrading your CV.