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A minor soapbox of mine: agile doesn't say anything about release cycle. What it says is that the goal is working software, not released software.

Software can be working but not released until it's working well.



Very true, but I've yet to see it practiced that way.


There's a huge swath of the industry where it doesn't make sense to release any faster than a few times a year. Think Office applications, RDBMS products, email servers, accounting apps, etc, etc. Even the fastest cadence apps (like browsers) are on more of a 6-week cycle. The web is unique in that every visit is an opportunity to deliver new code, but there's way to much friction with most application types to do that.


Also very true unfortunately. Hence the soapbox :-)


Out of interest, what was the goal of any other methodology?


All methodologies have the goal of working software. Where they differ is in how they try to get there.

Agile came about because people started saying "hey, this process we have for creating working software isn't actually creating working software. Maybe we should try another process."


Requirements ;-)


Software is a hell of a lot easier to write and test if you have a decent well thought out set or requirements. Getting that is far harder than any coding.


Any criticism of Agile, and the definition changes.


The definition of Agile is the Agile Manifesto. It doesn't change.


It's sort of like religion. The definition of Christianity is the Bible. The amount of Christian religions that actually care about what's written in the Book is minuscule.


> The definition of Christianity is the Bible.

The closest thing actually within Christianity to this is a relatively new idea ("new" in the context of how long Christianity has existed) particular to a subset of Protestant Christianity, and generally rejected by the rest of Christianity, to wit, the doctrine of sola scriptura. [0]

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sola_scriptura


it may sound silly, but look how far they got with these two ideas:

- why believe in god? because the bible said so..

- why believe in the bible? because god wrote it..




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