Waterfall and the Advent of Agility

I’ve been following this thread at TSS: Agile Software Development: True Adoption or Just a Label?

So far its been very interesting. The most interesting is this article about Waterfall: Managing the Development of Large Systems The comments made by the readers are excellent, on both sides of the argument. I especially found this comment very insightful:

When you read the Agile Manifesto, note that it’s not about practices, or languages, or technologies. It’s about a management style, a style of leading an organization that is very different from the typical command and control, which is still frequently used, particularly in government contracting.

The Lean Software Development books do a great job of explaining this. I think it really boils down to how contracts are defined. Things like TDD and continuous integration are just lower-level details.

My experience with agile processes has been interesting, and I have started to wonder how we can possibly measure success when there are no metrics to go by. Are we doing the right thing? I’ve learned a great deal in the past few years, but mostly in terms of leadership and development practices. I’ve learned how to become a better coder, but more as an after-effect of following the Agile methodologies. I’ve become an advocate of Lean Software Development, but this can only be as matter of common sense. How do we recognize the need to be lean or to continue with “whatever works”? Perhaps in a few more years, these will become clearer to me (though I wouldn’t bank on it).