I am ranting about Agile again...

...and I am not proud of myself. A couple of years ago I worked myself to a space where if it worked for you, what ever method you liked, my feeling was "power to you". Even among Agile proponents there were some reasonable voices who decried the prevailing "If it isn't Agile, it's Crap!" hysteria.

But I obviously keep tuned to writings and postings about Business Analysis and Requirements, and some of the stuff that used to annoy me is seeping back into the mainstream, basically that "we have to do all this hard Agile stuff because you can never get good requirements before you start coding."

A lot of it is couched in seemingly sincere attempts to find a place in Agile, in Scrum particularly, for that poor soul, the Business Analyst. Even actually sincere attempts to do this carry the implied the subtext that "we have to find something for the BA to do, because he could never manage to do what he was supposed to do, get the requirements done first.... we would not want to see him/her lose their job..." So, let's make him the Product Manager, especially since the real business product manager can't be bothered to get involved. (Corollary note: i see all the time that developers want to work more directly with business users, but I can't say as I see business users saying the same thing about developers.)

So, I try ignore this and carry on, but then I end up commenting on posts like
http://www.batimes.com/articles/the-business-analyst-facilitator-role-in-an-agile-software-development-team.html

Maybe things will calm down again and some moderation will prevail... I hope so.

Cutter IT Journal: my article on BPM

Hi all,

Have a look at http://www.cutter.com/offers/bpmalternative.html to see the May issue of the Cutter IT Journal, with my article on BPM leading off.