Blog Updates
Agile: It’s a Healthy Lifestyle Choice
Posted on May 09, 2010
There’s been a lot of talk lately about the preference toward being agile as opposed to doing agile. I agree – I’ve always said that you can’t just swap out your current practices for agile practices and expect it to work for you. Without understanding the underlying philosophy, principles, and values of agile, the implementation of the practices will be done with the wrong intent and false expectations – and they won’t stick.
A be vs. do agile analogy that seems to speak to many is that of healthy lifestyle vs. diet. Some folks seem to think of agile as a diet, a temporary change, instead of a long-term way of life.
With a diet, you change your eating habits and expect to lose weight as a result. Agile “dieters” change their practices, and expect to deliver on time as a result.
But what happens when a stress event occurs? We fall off our diet. We revert to form (back to our previous practices).
Even without a stress event, how long do we expect to stay on our diet? Until we lose the weight, usually, and then we gradually fall back into our old bad habits. Diets are the equivalent of working at an unsustainable pace – sooner or later, things fall apart.
But if we make a true change and adopt a healthy lifestyle that focuses on overall wellness, we can create a sustainable pace, keep making good choices even when things get hard, and not get discouraged if we occasionally fail to meet our goal. We focus on continuous improvement, and remove obstacles until our new healthy habits become something we can’t imagine being without.
So don’t try to go on an agile “diet.” Change the way your think about food – er, software development, I mean – and change your life.
Comments
Jonathan Rasmusson said:
Great post Michele. Completely agree. Doing agile well takes courage, will power, and discipline.
Much like a diet!
Thanks for sharing (and tweeting).
Cheers - JR
Leave a comment
Your email is never published or shared. Required fields are marked *.
Scott Duncan said:
May 10, 2010 at 9:44 am
Interesting that this very analogy came up during one of my Agile Coaches Camp discussions in North Carolina earlier this year. I don’t recall who brought it up, but it’s in my notes for the session and was out on the Camp wiki. Seems a useful metaphor, though.