Am I Agile?

There is a lot of discussion going around the blogosphere about the Agile methodology and ALT.Net. I was reading Billy McCafferty post titled 'Conveying Agile Processes Concisely to Clients' which gives a clear definition to clients (and a good introduction for me) about the Agile process and it dawned on me that I was more agile than I thought. Where I work we do not emphasise any methodology except get it done (gid??, giddy process??) and if a director wants it, get it done quick. As you can probably guess, this leaves no time to implement any TDD type of process and all testing is done at the end (although I would call this bug fixing). Some of the points mentioned in Bills post such as short iterations (they are always happy to see a working prototype) and prioritisation of features we are already doing. I am slowly trying to learn about agile and test first using NUnit, but it is slow going. I would get handed a small project and I think 'great, I can try out creating unit tests for this', alas I still find myself writing the code bypassing any unit tests then thinking 'oh I should of thrown in a test there...well it works'. Although I can retrospectively drop in tests as Derik Whittaker describes here. I don't want to be like that, I would like to test first and have the code covered, am I a bad developer? Well that brings me on to another thing, the ALT.Net conference in Texas. No I wasn't there, but I read a lot of the coverage from various blogs. Scott Hanselman mentioned that alt.net is a group that believe in:

1) Continuous Learning
2) Being Open to Open Source Solutions
3) Challenging the Status Quo
4) Good Software Practices
5) DRY (Don't Repeat Yourself)
6) Common Sense when possible

 

And I

1) All the time, I see myself as a continuous learner
2) I like using open source mainly because of the cost, if it cost me then I usually end up going without (I should emphasise that my latest place have been a bit more acceptable to the fact that a developer needs certain tools and they cost). But also I find they introduce new features faster.
3) Not much of a rebel, sorry
4) Again I am continuously learning about what I should be doing, here is a good guide to coding practices in c#
5) Yep
6) I think we all strive for this

So am I agile? Perhaps not, but I feel I am getting more agile every day.

When I linked from bad developer above to the alt.net conference I wasn't implying they are bad developers, no the link was less sinister; becoming a better developer means continually learning about development techniques and alt.net implies continuous learning. That's all.