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In some of my recent posts on Agile I voiced my excitement and support for …
Join the DZone community and get the full member experience. In some of my recent posts on Agile I voiced my excitement and support for the Agile 2 movement. Indeed, after many years in software a breath of fresh air can still get me motivated. Agile 2 has given a renewed incentive to everyone’s favorite waste of time: quarreling in comment threads about the True interpretation of the Agile Path. “Folks, can we please stop going around in circles. Agile is perfectly straightforward if you do it our way. Just come back from the Dark Side and get certified with us”. Forgive my tongue in cheek. Disagreement is not a waste of time. It’s the foundation of any democratic process. Software projects are still being scrapped midway or delivered with huge overruns, and Agile has not brought us the magic bullet. Have you not been involved in those projects, or been partly responsible? We still haven’t found what we’re looking for, as Bono sang. Every proposal to improve out methods, from modest to maverick, deserves to be heard. In this post I want to look at creativity and how it relates to the difference between frameworks and recipes. Frameworks prepare you for the unknown journey ahead. Recipes deal with repeating the predictable, not the new and unknown. I believe much of the confusion and disillusionment with Agile practices stems from viewing them as a surefire recipe or formula to solve problems that really call for a different creative solution each time. If you expect them to work like a cooking recipe, the balanced proposals from Agile 2 are as much in danger of being misconstrued as the original Agile Manifesto often is. A recipe lays out the path to your destination, but it assumes you can already walk.
