What is it with the recent rash of manifesto’s?
Since the signing of the Agile Manifesto a plethora of other Manifesto’s have arrived on the scene. Software Craftmanship, Project Management to name but a few.
They add NO value to development, in fact it seems their sole purpose is so that the signatories can make more money.
To me, this feels like the rash of CMM’s that arrived in the 90’s. The original CMM was a useful tool for measuring the maturity of an organization. We needed one and only one. The CMM was diluted by a number of new flavours; for Hardware; for Testing; for Software resulting in a lack of clarity of objectives & direction. Finally this was consolidated into CMMI and now it has become about implementing maturity (which even sounds ridiculous).
How long will it be before the various manifestos are consolidated into another chocolate teapot? See http://www.usingenglish.com/reference/idioms/about+as+useful+as+a+chocolate+teapot.html
I particularly like Dan North’s blog comment “When I looked at the Software Craftsmanship Manifesto, something inside me died. (Something else inside me burst out laughing and told the other thing to stop taking itself so seriously, so we’re all better now.)”….
…. without even a mention of Emergency Kittens – http://emergencykitten.com/ 🙂