Retrospective
Now that I’m at the end of this set of articles, a retrospective is in order.
I’m very pleased with the final shelves. They’ve been doing everything I need a shelf to do for months now, with no maintenance required. You have to love a feature that doesn’t require any support after go-live.
When I started writing these articles, I was curious what would come of it. I made a few key mistakes that prompted me to explore the project from an agile context, but I wasn’t sure what I would uncover.
Along the way I realized that “agile” is at risk of becoming a meaningless term. People are throwing “agile” in front of everything (including articles on home improvement projects).
The nice thing about agile is that it is a set of principles; a philosophy. And like any philosophy it has its strict adherents and its loose followers. It has those espousing the “right” way to practice agile and those that are bit more loose in their interpretation.
This can lead to ambiguity or confusion, but it also provides an opportunity for each of us to identify what we mean when we use the word “agile”.
This set of articles forced me to articulate what agile means to me.
If I reduce it to its basest essence, being agile to me is about assuming that you are wrong.