[Spearchucker]

There's this tendency I've started seeing more and more of in recent years. People pick an idea (be that a method, a technology or a philosophy) and make that their world. So you have people loudly proclaiming "We're agile", or "We're FOSS".

This isn't necessarily bad. It does get bad when it's exclusive of anything else. When someone tells me they only ever do something one way, what they're really saying is "We're incapable of introspection. We like our self-imposed status quo, and have no interest in improving ourselves."

Of course the other extreme is just as bad - change for the sake of change is just as destructive.

[lostcolony]

Slight tangent, but, the funny thing about "We're agile" is that it means so many different things to different people.

I've heard people describe themselves that way when they meant "We have no process", "We have a very specific process that we adhere to religiously, that has been billed as agile", and "We have a process that we are constantly trying to improve, through retrospectives and the like to figure out what works and what does not". Only with that latter one has the work seemed to get done on time.

[Spearchucker]

Yeah, there needs to be some maturity. It's rare, but it exists. I once worked for a consulting company where they chose their methodology based on the cultural environment of their client. It prompted me to put this post together - https://www.wittenburg.co.uk/Entry.aspx?id=d84dff2a-c5cd-463...