Clean Agile: Back to Basics (Robert C. Martin Series)

by Robert C. Martin

His perspective is relevant because he is an authority on the subject, having participated in the birth of Agile development.

This book aims to set the record straight.

Uncle Bob is one of the smartest people I know, and he has boundless enthusiasm for programming.

Still, you should not think of this book as a scholarly work.

Agile is a small idea about the small problem of small programming teams doing small things.

However, it all got derailed in the 1970s when the small software teams doing small things got all tangled up in an ideology that thought it should be doing big things with big teams.

These other ideas are not bad, but they are not the original Agile message.

a vast majority of those who don’t care.

The idea of choosing small intermediate goals and measuring the progress after each is just too intuitive, and too human, to be considered any kind of a revolution.

Pre-Agile worked well for projects that enjoyed a low cost of change and solved partially defined problems with informally specified goals. Scientific Management worked best for projects that suffered a high cost of change and solved very well-defined problems with extremely specific goals.

Nobody, to my knowledge, actually asked that question.

Ironically, the path we chose in the 1970s appears to have been driven more by accident than intent.

Could we really develop a schedule based on those three phases?

I felt the power of the concept. I wanted to believe it.

No disagreement. No argument. Not even any real discussion of alternatives.

In the end, though nobody really loved the word “Agile,” it was just the best of a bunch of bad alternatives.

A good manager drives a project to be good enough, fast enough, cheap enough, and done as much as necessary.

Indeed, it is entirely possible to work within the Agile framework and still completely mismanage the project and drive it to failure.

Agile provides data

What matters is the data.