Halfway through a four year stint in what was then a "peacetime" army (how quaint does THAT concept seem these days?), I was attached to a Special Forces team for the duration of a three month Arabic language course at the JFK Special Warfare Training Center, at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. I noticed my new classmates didn't seem to share my unit's obsession with spit shined boots and starched uniforms and buzz cuts, and I was stunned on our first day, when a low-ranking team member cut off an attempt, by an overzelous regular army officer classmate, to assign us some unrelated busy work, saying "No, lieutenant. That's not why we're here" -- leaving the young officer red faced and stuttering.
Over the next few weeks, in answer to my many questions, members of the team described HALO freefalls, sniper, SERE (survival, escape, resistance, and evasion), and Ranger schools, the stress of trying to keep a goat alive through a series of burns and bullet wounds inflicted as a part of medic training, techniques for constructing demolitions using common household materials, the experience of being "drowned" in a swimming pool by military scuba instructors, and much more. One afternoon, the team's medic suggested I join them at the local hospital after class, where they would practice giving each other injections. I expected to start off with some carefully-supervised sessions using oranges or something, but they just handed out vials and syringes, and the team's weapons man guided me through the steps, on his own arm. When I had trouble piercing the center of the vial cap because my hand was shaking, he just arched an eyebrow. When I failed to jab the needle deeply enough into his shoulder, and had to gradually PUUUUUUSH it in the rest of the way before depressing the plunger, he simply drew a deep breath slowly in through his teeth. Shrugging off my embarrassed apologies, he gave an evil grin and said, "My turn." Of course, I didn't feel a thing, and my own attempt on a second victim went much more smoothly, but I still turned down an invitation to come back the next week when they were scheduled to practice inserting IVs. The no-nonsense attitude and competence displayed by every member of the team was such a contrast to my experience in the regular army, that I spoke to a recruiter about transferring -- until I found out I'd have to extend my enlistment an additional three years.
The make up of a special forces team reflects many of the same values promoted by Agile methodologies, consisting of a small cross-functional team of expert individuals, who share a commitment to ruthless pragmatism. An S.F. team consists of a team leader, with one expert and an assistant to cover each of four specialized areas: weapons, communications, demolitions, and battlefield medicine. Team members continuously cross-train one another in their specialties, constantly attend courses to acquire new skills, and receive language, culture, and jungle, mountain, or dessert training appropriate to whatever region is their group's focus. They can't afford to suffer fools, or foolish processes, lightly.
In contrast to the pragmatic "adapt whatever proves useful" philosophy embraced by most Agile advocates today, the first generation of Agile proponents tried to impose their own brand of process fundamentalism, and only gradually mellowed, partly through the influence of thoughtfull critiques, such as in the book, "Extreme Programming Refactored: The Case Against XP". Most published Agile references now emphasize that Agile practices are not a "one size fits all" proposition, and it's the shared underlying Agile PRINCIPLES, rather than any specific methodology, which are important for organizations to cultivate.
"Critics of the first edition have complained that it tries to force them to program in a certain way... I'm embarrassed to say that was my intention... in this edition, I have tried to rephrase my message in a positive, inclusive way" -- Kent Beck, in the preface to his second edition of "Extreme Programming Explained".
Unfortunately, some development groups remain unfamiliar with even the most the basic concepts of Agile development, with management still determined to try to nail down a "complete" design and "accurate" schedule up front, dividing responsibility for work into separate silos, preferring innocuous mission statements and shiny quality commitment plaques to the potential confrontation inherent in rigorous code reviews and post-mortems... After ten years of intense discussion in the software developer community, with support for Agile practices increasingly baked directly into the developer tool set, that's hard to excuse.
As irrational as some management decisions affecting your development group may sometimes appear to be, at least they aren't likely to get you killed. When my Arabic language course ended, I returned to my own unit, just in time for our commander to order us to get our newly-redesigned camoflauge uniforms starched and pressed. The uniforms came packaged with warnings from the manufacturer, clearly stating that starching and pressing would destroy infrared dispersing properties embedded into the fabric, making them a bright target for anyone with a night vision scope. I suspect that more than a few individuals in a Special Forces unit would have stood up to remind the commander of why they were there...