Anyone who knows me, understands my thoughts concerning agile development. Any system that forces us to use the word “feel” as often as agile does is not  a software development methodology. Feelings are simply the emotions that flow from the confluence of beliefs and (often difficult) circumstances.

It isn’t bad to have feelings about what we do for a living because they provide intuition and help us to discern between right and wrong. But feelings cannot be measured. And we are judged by our customers and employers based on what we can do for them, not on our feelings.

I prefer the Capability Maturity Model (CMM) because it’s focused on defining positive outcomes and driving development toward what will make them come true in a predictable way. At the Carnegie Mellon University Software Engineering Institute, they created something called SPIN which stands for the Software Process Improvement Network. It’s largely based on the CMM.

For my friends in Richmond, Virginia, you may want to know that a Richmond chapter of SPIN just started up. Check it out.