We tend to follow a more traditional (waterfall)
dev cycle, with patch releases roughly every 1-2 weeks and major
releases every 2 months.
If you release every two weeks, with a define-design-develop-deploy cycle in those weeks, then you may very well be doing agile development. In my current project we're employing Scrum (but I really don't think that matters; might as well name it Lean, Kanban, XP, RUP or whatever) and we're doing just that. It's working pretty darn well, I may add, primarily because of the near-continuous customer feedback.
It certainly doesn't sound like that's what he means. I expect "patch releases" means bug fixes and small tweaks.
In any case, the guy said they don't do agile. I am really loathe to try to go in and discover a way in which it could be interpreted as agile after the fact lest it feed into the whole consulting/book-selling/conference-organizing/koolaid circus that agile has already become.
"In any case, the guy said they don't do agile. I am really loathe to try to go in and discover a way in which it could be interpreted as agile after the fact"
Amen!
Classifing any project with a practice passing resemblance to some "agile" practice as an "agile project " just leads to the twinned "all successful projects were really doing agile whether they knew it or not" and the "any failed agile project didn't do "proper" agile, even if they said they were" fallacies.
This is especially weird since "agile" really didn't invent anything (except maybe rigid TDD). It just packaged some "best practices" into one label. Short iterations was a known to be effective practice well before the advent of agile.
My thoughts exactly. If you're iterating this fast, you're pretty much doing agile, whether you follow SCRUM/XP/etc or not. As I understand it, the various agile practices are simply there to enable these quick iterations.
If you release every two weeks, with a define-design-develop-deploy cycle in those weeks, then you may very well be doing agile development. In my current project we're employing Scrum (but I really don't think that matters; might as well name it Lean, Kanban, XP, RUP or whatever) and we're doing just that. It's working pretty darn well, I may add, primarily because of the near-continuous customer feedback.