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 If we try to apply agile to everything, we must inevitably lose content. To begin with "working software", right there on the tin. Sure, there are parallels in other disciplines, but when we remove the differences, we're left with little more than platitudes, it seems to me.
@RonJeffries
there is a different way to look at this ... suppose we borrow what was learned from the agile sw dev crowd, and see how it applies elsewhere. Then "sw" isn't on the tin any more, and isn't even in the equation.
Sw ppl don't own the word 'agile', it was around as a fine word long before, and will be long after.
So if anyone not in sw wanted some of the same soup, what ingredients would it contain?
@totheralistair they can't have the same soup. Software isn't like anything else. They could have biz and dev people working together. They /might/ be able to evolve a product, but probably not every ten minutes. Etc. Seems to me the parallels are pretty clear, mostly around folx working together making the thing.