By: mfloryan

mfloryan — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 21:28:11 +0000

I come from Poland and thus have had first hand experience of communism, I also work in an Agile environment now. I may sound a little bit cynical here, but I don’t think there is any way in which you can even attempt to compare agile and communism – that is – the true and real communism as people experienced it behind the Iron Curtain not the idealistic concept. Communism undignified people, undermined trust and had no respect for individual. Agile is based on trust, value the individual, teamwork and commitment.
I can however see how people can think of agile to be communism like – but they mistake collective ownership (i.e. no-one owns it) to collaborative ownership (i.e. we all have responsibility).

By: Gino Marckx

Gino Marckx — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 22:34:02 +0000

Even if you would consider that Communism and Agile share similar values, failure of one doesn’t necessarily imply failure of the other…
I would actually start with debating that communism as a philosophy hasn’t failed, but large scale implementations have. The failures I immediately think of – not through experience though – suffered from continuously decreasing quality as a result of competitive capitalist behaviour (not sharing fundamental communist values). Similarly, agile adoption will not likely be successful for teams not sharing fundamental agile values, such as delivering high quality products and services.
So does that imply that large scale agile adoption cannot be successful? I don’t think so. Citizenship leaves you with few choices on which political system to live in. Companies however might provide you with a few options, maybe even mixing both agile and other approaches. So instead of forcing a single process onto all employees, individual ‘preferences’ can be taken into account in the team, department, even in the company. After all… we value people and interactions over processes and tools…

Comments on: Agile is Not Communism

By: mfloryan

By: Gino Marckx