Welcome to Agile!

    As Agile Software Development gains more and more ground in the IT world, I thought it may be a good idea to write a few personal opinions about this topic.

    During my last 17 years of practice more and more with Agile and less and less with Waterfall, I noticed a few crucial differences, often not spoken, between Waterfall world and Agile world.

    I will add a few important things related to people, which I collected when analyzing people and their interactions, while performing Business Analyst specific tasks:

• these two giants will attract different sets of people; you just cannot ignore this;
• these 2 different sets of people will establish a very specific set of relations between them and with the external world;
• I cannot say in an objective mode, since I am an Agile adept, which one is better; I just know for sure that the traditional way and the new way are different;
• one of the most important aspect is the people openness to new approaches, always and always improved;
• same things I should and could say about adopting, embracing new technologies and tools;
• another major difference would be from the standpoint of their attitude: "let's move forward!" vs "keep it like this, because it's perfect!";
• one more aspect I want to share with you is that some of the traditional individuals (Waterfall) see in Agile no more than Scrum and this is probably the toughest barriers in their advance.

    For all of you, who are reading these thoughts of mine, I need to let you know that Agile, from the perspective of methods, methodologies, techniques, frameworks, tools and practices, means incredible much more.

    If you want to start learning about it, you can start it by having a deep study of how Wikipedia defines it and also pay attention to the right column of good stuff. See here Wiki's Agile Software Development page.

    I will probably have another article on Agile Management, Agile Sales and everything related to Agile, one of the best results of Lean thinking.

    If you know what I mean with all of these above, and agree or not, please leave your comments below.