Nick showed me this today. My favourite part:
At a workshop once, Pete McBreen said “The Agile methods are methods created by people who like to program.” While that’s not entirely true, we bet it’s more true of that particular bunch of people than of any previous gaggle of methodologists. And their oddity went even further: a surprising number of the authors of the Agile Manifesto had programmed in Smalltalk. They were technology enthusiasts, and that enthusiasm—a “gosh wow!” enthusiasm for continuous integration tools, refactoring tools, programming languages, testing tools, and the like—has been a continuous part of the growth of Agile. It’s been a touch disreputable, though—because of the Agile Manifesto’s “individuals and interactions over processes and tools”—so we’ve chosen the artistic style called retro-futurism to call renewed attention to it.
Think about that next time someone tries to convince you that a pseudo-software development methodology based merely on assembly-line queue management and with no direct relation to software is a good thing.
Working in software development management teaches you that is really, really hard to beat a team of highly motivated and talented developers working well together.
Therefore when you, as a manager, choose a development methodology, you know you will get better results with ones that does no get in the way of highly motivated and talented development teams.
When Pete McBreen said “The Agile methods are methods created by people who like to program.” he seems to be getting pretty close to the same point.