From SOX to Scrum: We've Come a Long Way...

If you're a hard-nosed developer you might not like the methods brought in 'from above'. You might think that scrum for instance is just another annoying management fad that is being imposed to you by ugly trolls.

Well stop mumbling like an old lady because it could be much worse. You don't really know what pain is until you've been through compliance changes such as Sarbanes-Oxley where any handoff between teams becomes an opportunity for setting up a quality gate and multi-layered document sign-offs. Customers are made guilty for requesting changes, developers are made guilty from any deviation from the plan...

Out of all methods/standards I was exposed to over over the years I prefer the agile family where the feedback of users facing a working product is the main driver for everything else. And agile is focused on making that feedback happen as often as possible. Check out this video shot between Tokyo and Singapore: