There are enthusiastic early adopters willing to try the New Thing based on what its description appears to promise. If early results are promising, then the adoption rate rises. The so-called “early majority pragmatists” pick up the New Thing on the basis of anecdotal succes stories.

Right about then, vendors, consultants, and pundits start to re-craft their marketing material around the newly popular buzzword. That’s when things start to get confusing. IMO that’s where the industry is right now with respect to “agile”.

Regarding the distinction between agile and lean, I agree with the statement made by commenter “Deb” above. Mechanically or procedurally, agile and lean are largely the same. It’s the relative emphasis on process vs people that makes the difference, and a very subtle difference it may be.

AGILE Fees Feeding Frenzy - http://www.claretyconsulting.com/it/comments/agile-fees-feeding-frenzy/2006-07-27/

AGILE Enough is Enough -
http://www.claretyconsulting.com/it/comments/agile-enough-is-enough/2006-06-26/

Before I go I want to say that AGILE is not all bad it is just gone to far and is causing more harm than good from recent troublshooting experience.

Lean empowers survival when resources are scarce; the ascetic who lives by the river and eats mud can obviously get by on very little, however, there may little tangible action to show for this methodolgy, rather it’s the spiritual synergy that empowers this enterprise.

Agile, on the other hand, focuses like a laser beam on constant action-based improvement, while deemphasizing the need to pause and reflect on the consequences of each decision. That’s where the importance of leadership emerges as a disruptive force.

Neither one of these frameworks implies an ability to lift heavy things or actually get anything done.

The essential thing that I can see on this “new” processes is a shift on the focus from technology oriented processes to people oriented processes.

When we put People at the center, not minds or hands alone, we are recognizing what software development is a highly knowledge oriented activity, as far as I know the most adapted tool for transforming, relating and producing new knowledge is People.

All this new processes are more people focused, this gives them the edge, are better aligned with the real needs of a people intensive production system.

In my company balance sheet, I have a column where says “Assets”, there are listed the chairs, computers, tools, etc. that make up the software development department. From this, Industrial age, view of the economics of a company People are expenses not “Assets”.
Anybody with a little more understanding on software development and how it works, can tell that the rigth culture, with the rigth people, that may learn, and adapt its work to the more effective process, and tools and practices, this are the real “Assets”.

What i’m trying to say here is we are experiencing is a paradigm shift, one from the Industrial age to the Knowledge age, wich is creating a lot of conflicts as systems are becoming obsolete, like on the process side upfront vs. more agile, management vs. leadership, etc.

The agile movement is one subset of the bigger scene of changes that we will be experiencing, and this won’t cease, as more and more companies, groups of people, start understanding the fundamentals of this paradigm shift, and embracing it, we will see a massive adoption of more people focused processes and systems, the economics simply will do its job, and maybe yes we will need to wait until some of the grayed guys leave, or until we may influence them, slowly but constantly.

On the end is really about anything that allow us to do be effective on developing software that adds value.

There needs to be set of core set of lifecyle practices, procedures in an organization and each project depending on its size, nature, circumstances should draw/customize a process from its environment.

I feel there is no magic formula that works for all situation and for all projects and companies.

Project planning and strategy needs to mature higher to custom define process for any initiative. Process/software engineering should mature to provide such assets and environment.