The Empire Strikes Back or Agilism vs. Productivity Paradigm

by Borys Stokalski

The rise of agile methodologies has brought a lot of dispute and confusion into the IT community. Arguments such as "there's nothing new under the sun" and "return to the stone age" are often used as a defensive reaction to "agilism." At the other end of the dispute, the devotion of adaptive development proponents makes many think that the old ways made sacred by venerable institutions such as the Software Engineering Institute are now threatened by some kind of e-vandalism. The statement about the death of the software productivity paradigm pronounced by Cutter Consortium Senior Consultant Michael Mah at the 2001 Cutter Consortium Summit was one of the most provocative assertions fueling this dispute. In my humble opinion, the issue Mah brought up is a fundamental one. If agile approaches are indeed achieving their objective -- which is to effectively run projects that are business critical, fast, and need to accommodate high-scope volatility -- then this fact tells us a lot about what software productivity is as well as how it should be measured.