As I have mentioned before, I attended a breakfast talk by Steve McConnell (http://www.construx.com) entitled “Legacy of Agile Software Development”. During the talk, Steve skipped over the section of the slides labeled “Agile Practices That Tend to be Problematic”. I grabbed the slides after the presentation to see what he had to say.
Note: Steve is not necessarily saying these are bad — just that the teams his company has evaluated, these practices have not provided the value that they promise.
- System Metaphor - Least understood practice
- On-Site Customer - Difficult to achieve
- Collective Code Ownership - Uneven code quality and sometimes results in lack of ownership.
- Pair Programming - Sweet spot between junior and senior programmer
- Refactoring - Good practice whose name is used to cover up bad behavior