Software

Having been around the block a few times, I've seen the birth and death or lots of heavily promoted and often oversold 'better ways of doing things'. Beyond the utopia promised by JIT and ERM, now the software development process is being dragged into becoming "agile".

The irony of this is that the organization I've been working with has now perfected their approach to using the old-school waterfall methodology.

Everything is done very well, from both a project-management and governance standpoint. Like a well oiled machine, they crank out the projects, follow the methodology, and document things very well (really, this is true!).

So in flies a new CIO who did agile development at his old company, and the 'new religion' is now agile, agile, agile.

From an IT governance perspective it looks to me like I'm likely to hear something like:

"we don't need no stinking governance, it will slow us down"

I envision software development efforts to be run with all the precision and discipline of a bunch of toddlers high on sugar.

I realize that part of the governance process is to just stand back and judge the final results, and not get knee-deep in the specifics of how it's done.

My main concern is that there simply 'won't be enough time' to follow procedures consistently, document things adequately, or make sure important elements like application security are not given 'drive-by' attention.

Is this a valid concern, or am I suffering from Powerpoint fatigue from seeing slide shows about how agile development will save the planet??