Methodologies are not Infallible or Timeless

July 26th, 2013

Agile methodologies are a big trend. Some adherents promote their methodologies like religious fanatics. They tell you that your soul will burn in hell if you don't embrace the teachings… err that you'll have a dysfunctional team and that your project will fail. Although these methodologies have some merits, they're not infallible.

The belief that an agile methodology works for everyone, in any situation and will continue to work is problematic. It would be like saying that a programming framework is suitable for all developers, in any project and will still be "the thing" ten years from now. We all know that this is not true. We have seen design patterns such as singleton become anti-patterns. We have seen new ones such as dependency injection rise to power, and of course, what seemed so amazing  in 1999 is an old relic by today's architectural standards. Things always evolve, but today's agile proponents sound like they have the absolute and immutable answer.

In reality, many agile methodologies are naive and outdated, or applied in an overly zealous manner. They're certainly better than no methodology at all, because it's otherwise hard to get everyone on the same page. But people must remain open-minded when others challenge their methodology or find better ways to do things. Accept the fact that years from, you will look back at your current methodology and say "what were we thinking?" I'm sure that at the time, people thought that the DDT insecticide was a good idea, until it was eventually banned.

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