Billy Hollis has out an interesting article in the latest Visual Studio Magazine about the possible destiny of Agile Development.

(sidenote: what the hell has happened to VBPJ VSM? Am I the only one that remembers the days when that mag was just shy of a phonebook and literally every article was worth the read? This latest issue is barely enough paper to wipe your a$s! Seriously. It's sad).

Anyway, Hollis calls out Agile Dev fans, sort of. He takes a bit of a middle of the road stance, which, actually, I find quite refreshing. To me, Agile has always seemed more like a tactic to avoid really learning to improve your craft and rather, just plowing forward, balls-to-wall to get something working, dammit! It kind of reminds me of a quote I once read supposedly from Steven King. When asked what his process was for writing books, he said something like "I just keep flailing away at the damn thing till I have something I like."

Now, don't get me wrong. Getting something working is important. But the more I look at the tenets of Agile, the more I wonder whether it's really the consultants recommending it and the experts teaching it for 1000$ a day that stand to gain anything from it. It just sounds like yet another in a long line of silver bullets.

The best line from Hollis's article is:

Most developers love to write code, and agile does a pretty good job of rationalizing why developers don't need to do anything else.

Ouch!