I see this sometimes: To be agile requires technical practices, that's the foundation. If technical practices are ignored (which is the common case), we get FlaccidScrum.
I might agree, but I need to ask, what are the technical practices for an org transformation project? and what are the technical practices for installing a clean water system in a rural village?
Expansion on the question: XP was mostly tech practices for programming. Scrum contains no tech practices for any domain. People complain about SCrum that it misses XP's tech practices. Now I see general comments that "agile in general" is missing XP's tech practices, but they don't say "XP's tech practices", they say just "tech practices."
But agile is applicable everywhere, not just programming. When you are not in programming, XP's tech practices are not relevant ---- so, if we choose to agree that tech practices are essential to agile, we have to ask what are those tech practices that apply to some other endeavor.
People who know me also spot here that this is my way of rebutting the assertion that tech practices are the foundation of agile. if you/they can't name the tech practices for other fields, then the assertion "tech practices are the foundation of agile" is false.
So it is both an interesting question in its own right, and a challenge to the assertion. Typical Alistair styles, lol.
@totheralistair I think XP’s tech practices are so noticeably because of the general lack of an engineering culture in most of the industry. It is possible that other industries had solved that problem before Agile came along. My sense is that most Scrum implementations are in software and therefore it is the wrong approach on its own.
@chetHendrickson
re: scrum: replace "most" with "some" and i'll be on the same track as regards scrum in software. ... now, let's take would-be-agile teams away from software, and leave off the word scrum entirely .... and .... we're back to my original post.
