I want to come back to the discussion about Agile vs. CMMI. After a presentation about the subject in UTN (National Technological University) in Córdoba a couple of weeks ago, I started thinking a bit differently on the subject. I thought that instead of asking the question “Are CMMI and Agile Methods compatible” the important question is “Should CMMI and Agile Methods be compatible?”
In other words, if they are not compatible, so what? Isn’t software development an incredibly wide field so as to need different approaches to different problems? Didn’t for example Management benefit during its evolution from new theories that presented different points of view about how organizations should be managed? CMMI and Agile methods present many incompatibilities (at the CMMI practice level and not at the goal level), and one of the reasons is that they follow different management theories.