Alistair Cockburn, a signatory on The Manifesto for Agile Software Development, talks about the agile landscape, what has changed and where his methodology, Crystal, fits in. In particular, he talks about how the term agile has become overused and has begun to lose meaning. People say they're using agile techniques, but they're actually doing "hacking and slashing" -- what he calls "lost in the woods programming." In David Letterman style, he even lists the top 10 things of how you know you're not doing agile. Some of those include:

1. The team is co-located, but people are not sitting within the length of a school bus to each other.
2. The team is distributed, and there is an absence of microphones and webcams and one or two meetings a day.
3. The team has not delivered anything to real users in the last three months.
4. No user has seen real running software inside the last month.

Cockburn goes on to explain his methodology, Crystal, and how it compares with Scrum and Extreme Programming (XP). In a nutshell: "XP brought pair programming and refactoring and automated unit tests. Scrum brought this dynamic reprioritization and self-organization. And Crystal brings this notion of a reflection workshop, and the process tunes itself or the team tunes the process on a monthly basis within the course of the project."

hehehe, cockburn

Once he wrote good articles, not only about Use Cases.

AJL programming language that is. As for the article, well it sounds like a free for all. and if I had a rule for a great team I would say leave it alone and let it get the work done which is what this article seems to be about. I didnt see anything specific about Agile in this article just ramblings. Flag it for removal from TSS if you care. Is there such a flag?

There's plenty about Agile, where he mentions "The Manifesto" this is referring to the Agile Manifesto. Better read it again.

I just worked at a place that believed they were doing agile. But it was really put in place by someone who was a complete cowboy. We weren't allowed to document _anything_ and that included JavaDoc and _all_ commenting. Yep, not even simple inline comments. They believed that agile meant there was no documentation so they leaped at it. Needless to say the app was 12 months old and in a complete shambles. Working on it was like running a marathon under water. I couldn't get them to understand the error of their ways though.