3months Agile Consulting Blog

I just came across this post from Michael Hugos. He compares the adoption of agile practices to the training of athletes. I quote:

“Agility makes you sore at first too. But it gets a lot better if you resolve to stick with it; after a while you don’t get sore at all - quite the opposite”

Further down he then makes the point that agile is not easy and that it comes with a lot of constraints:

“People want to be agile but they don’t like the tight constraints that come with being agile. They offer all sorts of reasons and excuses; they want more time to create quality software; they want more time to do system testing; or they want more time to investigate system requirements.”

Every serious athlete will work out in the most efficient way. I have never heard anyone saying that he/she wouldn’t train in a clearly more productive way just because “that’s not how things are done around here” or they “always worked out this way”. These people tend to move on an amateur level or are literally left behind - and that is also true in the business world.

Yes, when starting out you might feel sore or bruises - but if you never get out of your comfort zone then you will never improve!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 28th, 2007 at 9:37 am and is filed under agile. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.