Pragmatic Agilist

I've been putting my shoulder to a wheel which Jim Highsmith has steadily pushed for a long time, and which Gojko Adzic has started actively evangelizing over the past year or so, which is a group effort to brand, rationalize, and advertise practices to help teams "build the right thing" as a complement to the fairly well established "agile" practices for helping those teams "build things right." Like the Agile Manifesto drafters, who came together in 2001 as established and successful software delivery practitioners, Adzic has brought together some wonderfully talented practitioners into his discussion space, many of whom have already published substantively on the topic.  To name just a few: Adzic himself with his 2013 book, Impact Mapping: Making a big impact with software products and projects , building on his previous explications of specification by example . Ellen Gottesdeiner and Mary Gorman with their 2013 book, Discover to Deliver:  ...

I was speaking with a group of fellow would-be agile change agents last week, and one of us described "the opposite of agile" as "mortgage driven development."  Of course I found this funny and apt, and I looked it up online, where I found Jason Gorman's tongue in cheek manifesto for the MDD movement online: We are uncovering better ways of making money from software by doing it and hindering others from doing it. Through this work we have come to value: Timesheets and invoices over principles and ethics Unmaintainable software over clean code Contract renegotiation over a barrel Unlimited overtime over a sustainable pace Contracts that fall outside of IR35 over and over again But as I reflected on the matter, I realized I would prefer to describe the above manifesto in terms of "Marauder Driven Development" instead, if we must have a straw man abbreviated to MDD.  Our enemy isn't mortgage-holders with their desire to maintain a sta...