"So now the Lord has put a lying spirit in the mouths of all these prophets of yours. The Lord has decreed disaster for you." - 1 Kings 22:23 (NIV)

One of the first things I ask of any potential client with an internal development team, or a team of developers that they've contracted elsewhere, is for a description of their development process. If instead of the asked for description, I get proper names (or worse, acronyms) thrown at me, I shudder a little. If at any point I hear the word 'religion', as in "Methodology X is practically a religion around here," I throw up a little in my mouth.

What I've noticed over the past couple of years is that the people most likely to utter that sickening phrase are those using one of the many, many, many flavors of Agile.

[sidenote: Have you ever sat down and counted the number of development methodologies and processes that have shoved themselves under the Agile umbrella? A brief perusal of my bookshelf and old bookmarks yielded ten:

• Adaptive Software Development (ASD)
• Agile Modeling
• Agile Unified Process (AUP)
• Evolutionary Project Management (Evo)
• Extreme Programming (XP)
• Feature-Driven Development (FDD)
• Lean Development
• OpenUP
• Rational Unified Process (RUP)
• Scrum

…and I'm sure there are more that I've never taken the time to read up on.]

I realize that Agile is all the rage these days, but give me a break. If you're referring to your software development methodology as a religion, allow me to gently suggest that you consider professional help…and I don't necessarily mean the sort of professional help that you would get from a consultant, I mean professional help of the psychiatric variety.

Software development is not religion. Your development processes are not dogmatic guidelines to which you should cling for dear life. No one will die if you fail to worship at the RUP altar of IBM. No one is going to hell if you decide to make a plan, or do a little requirements gathering , or even sketch a UI before your developers start coding. And I promise, the nuns aren't going to rap you across the knuckles with a ruler if you create a little documentation along the way.

(However, your software project could very well go straight to hell, or purgatory at the very least, if you insist on not doing some of those things. Keep in mind that Agile works best when applied in very specific contexts: 1) A team comprised of generalists instead of specialists, 2) Small, contained pieces of functionality, and 3) Individual pieces of software that will not need to be integrated with other software, or into the framework of a larger whole)

More often than not, it is ambitious project managers, or R&D wonks, who happened to read a book on Agile (or just stumbled across 37signals) while waiting for a delayed flight on their most recent useless business trip, that are preaching the gospel that is rapid application development. They exalt the virtues of user stories and scrums. They can often be found muttering to themselves something that sounds an awful lot like...

    Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
    Working software over comprehensive documentation
    Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
    Responding to change over following a plan

…and they are coming after you with a fervor that would make a Southern Baptist minister at a summer revival look apathetic.

You don't have to get dunked in the river. You don't have to drink the Kool-Aid. You don't have to sacrifice reasonable planning and design to the false prophets of project management. You don't have to adopt a literal interpretation of the scripture that will have you chanting "stories, tasks, iterations" or pushing functionality into a release that your framework isn't ready to handle just because a "user" (read as: customer) says they want it.

Sometimes it's ok to say no, even to the people that are paying you.

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