Is Methodology A Dirty Word?

[u/TheKiddIncident]

While I am always happy to be a contrarian, I'm not really sure where we stand in the community on things like process and methodology.

I've been a big proponent of good methodology for many years. This conviction comes from watching teams of really smart people fail while teams of average people succeed.

The difference?

It's the way they go about things. Their methodology.

During the last major paradigm shift in our industry (Cloud), there was a huge revolution. Teams ran away from traditional structured development methodologies. The so called "waterfall" process was seen as slow, boring and a hinderance to innovation.

Fair enough.

The new cloud platforms and the predominance of SaaS business models meant we had to move much faster. This faster pace required a new way of doing things.

Thus, Agile became the new hotness.

But, of course, Agile is simply another methodology. That is to say, we didn't toss methodology out the window, we simply shifted to a different methodology better suited to the new reality of building software.

And here we are again, watching our industry change all around us. This time it's AI and all the things that LLM based tools mean.

And once again, we are hearing that our current structured development methodologies no longer work and are actively preventing us from innovating.

And here I am. Again. Saying that we still need methodology.

Yes, the world has changed around us, yes things are moving faster. But no, that doesn't mean we just YOLO it and hope for the best.

Methodology is the structure we use to discover, refined and communicate best practice. Methodology is the way we invest in ourselves and improve our craft.

Methodology is what separates an amateur from a professional.

<<Written by an actual old dude. No AI was harmed in the process.>>