In recent years, agile software development has enjoyed a steady rise in popularity, but now some developers have begun criticizing the methodology. At the Reaktor Dev Day in Finland, computer scientist Erik Meijer told the crowd, “Agile is a cancer that we have to eliminate from the industry.” He added, “We talk too much about code, we don?t write enough code.”
Technical architect Nic Ferrier agrees that “sprints are utterly ridiculous ways to produce software,? but disagrees with Meijer’s overall thesis. Ferrier says, “It’s not Agile that sucks, and dragging programmers down. It’s the inability of programmers and business people to understand each other.”
And Dave Thomas, a signatory of the Agile Manifesto, has said, “The word ‘agile’ has been subverted to the point where it is effectively meaningless, and what passes for an agile community seems to be largely an arena for consultants and vendors to hawk services and products.”
