[Discuss] Agile software for a nacent project

[markw at mohawksoft.com (Mark Woodward)]

On 07/12/2012 12:16 PM, Doug wrote:

I think "agile" development is probably the most abusive management 
technique ever devised. Sure, aspects of it are good software 
development processes, but the implementation is pretty exploitive, in 
my opinion. Every "agile" environment I have seen works the engineers to 
death. The "scrum" meetings are another form of micromanagement with the 
added benefit of peer coercion.

A few years back, a lot of people were excited, but today, I have yet to 
meet anyone that doesn't think "agile" is a meat grinder. It burns out 
good people and produces poor product quality.

> Does an agile development process make sense for projects that are all
> volunteer based, with people who don't live in the same states or
> countries?  In my job, we use greenhopper, part of www.atlassian.com
> set of software.  There are morning scrum meetings, story sessions,
> sprint planning and sprint completions.  That makes sense when
> everyone drives to the same building.  For a volunteer based project,
> those regular meetings are not going to be held.
>
> I can imagine a planning board being of use.  "Look, here,
> specifically is what we want done next."  That could be overkill
> however, with say a newsgroup, twiki and github being sufficient.
>
> If you do think some aspects of the agile process make sense, what
> software would you use?  I could pony up $20/month and use atlassian's
> hosted service.  I don't think I will have 10 people who want to code
> in a year, but one never knows.  If it does take off, then the costs
> jump.
>
> The project of course involves quaternions, thinking about making
> animation software using the multimedia Java platform known as
> processing (http://processing.org/) for web sites and android phones.
>
> Doug
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