If it looks like Agile and smells like Agile....
...then is it?
Yesterday I attended a meeting from our company's shiny new Software Development Methodologies Competence Center. A large part of the evening was reserved for MSF Agile. Microsof's Rossen Blagoev gave us an overview on the subject and told us some interesting things. He started by telling us some facts about the framework. One of the facts was that MSF has been around since 1993 and that other agile methodologies came up starting somewhere in the year 2000. He didn't actually say it, but it sounded like he was telling us that Microsoft invented the agile methodolgy. There are probably some people who want to comment on that ;-)
But is MSF Agile really agile? I'm not a real expert on the matter, but during the presentation I got the feeling that there is something missing. Rossen explained that MSF Agile fully complies to the Agile Manifesto and therefore really is Agile. Even Kent Beck was consulted for this by Microsoft and he could not disagree. The thing that is bottering me is that MSF Agile is a stripped down version of MSF 3.0 and tweaked to comply to the rules. Other agile methodologies on the other hand where created to solve problems that the existing methodologies could not solve. I think that this is a significant difference.
Furthermore the first "rule" of the manifesto is "Individuals and interactions over processes and tools". I think that MSF Agile doesn't really comply to the tools part. MSF Agile is thightly integrated with Microsoft's Team System and my guess is that they will make it even thigther in the future. As Rossen said, he hopes that like SAP and ASAP, Oracle and CDM, MSF Agile and VSTS will also be mentioned in one breath.
Does this make MSF Agile a bad methodology? Certainly not! MSF Agile is a lightweight proces that will make a perfect fit for a lot of projects. One of out teams is actualy working with it on a project and they appeared quite satisfied with it, especially with the Team System support for the process.
During his presentation Rossen made a good point by saying that Agile is all about trust. The problem is, that many large organizations are not. MSF Agile helps with this by specifying more formal things as an architecture and formal reports.