It’s now almost 15 years since publishing the Agile Manifesto. “Agile” has become mainstream, but because of that, many people have many different ideas what “Agile” means. We see people hating Agile because they suffered through a strawman version of it. We see people arguing pointlessly about “what Agile is”. We see people cynically selling superficial, ineffective Agile training–and worse, we see people happily buying it. We read reports of Agile failures with only the occasional Agile success. Five years ago we started to see so-called “Post-Agile” and people claiming that Agile is Dead. For a variety of reasons, XP is ready to make a comeback. Some say that it is already coming back. I’d like to discuss this horrible mess, including how we should exploit it (for good, not for evil), and how it’s really important that we resist the urge to tell everyone “WE TOLD YOU SO”.
J. B. (Joe) Rainsberger is one of the “second wave” of TDD practitioners: he learned directly from the pioneers of the field. His book, JUnit Recipes, was the standard for over a decade for Java programmers who wanted to do what we today call developer testing or programmer testing. He has taught thousands of programmers around the world to bring high discipline to their work for well over a decade.
Not “just a programmer”, J. B. has taught people how to manage the never-ending onslaught of work, figure out how to adopt new working practices chaos-free, understand and even grow to respect their most annoying co-workers, find the time and energy to improve as though finding loose change in the couch cushions, turn their dreary day job into a Dream Job–even how he enjoyed his first retirement from age 34 to 40! Software, life. Agile, not Agile. He’s up for anything.
Read his work at jbrains.ca and blog.thecodewhisperer.com!