A long, long time ago I started life (okay college life) as an Engineer. Electrical. Analog. For having grown up with always having a computer in my room I was about as far away from the digital world I could get and still be technical. Computing was easy. Oh pascal, if only you could see me now. Those were wild days, staying up until all hours of the night sitting in a basement computer lab trying to finish an assignment. When I wasn’t at classes or getting into a variety of trouble, I would spend time with my roommate, a Mac user. He’d mock my Amiga; “Do you really need two buttons?” I’d mock the Mac (pre-classic) “Hey I’ve got 4096 colors” but we’d agree on one thing, both were better than that loser IBM machine two dorm rooms down the hall.

Then came real life, I fell into the digital world, and found myself back in school getting a more formal digital education. I found myself in Design Patterns, listening to people around me furiously debating the merits and needs of singletons, factories and observers.

Then came Java, and the arguments continued. Performance, idiosyncracies of langauge (both C++ and Java) etc., etc.

Then came Open Source. Don’t get me started with open source. If the OS mafia reads anything I write they’ll try to shutdown our website.

Now we have Agile. And Lean Development. And Continuous Integration (CI). I’ll lump them together because they are the current arguments I hear today. Yeah, arguments. Developers become elevated and yell out “You’re not really agile!” I read books on what it means to be Lean, and how to identify if you are Lean. I find CI writers muttering under their breath that any build process that occurs hourly isn’t truly CI.

They’ve lost focus. Or more importantly their focus should not be your focus.

I wasn’t hired because I was a Design Patterns zealot. I wasn’t hired because there was a need for an expert on Lean Development. I wasn’t hired to support code in the OS movement. I was hired to produce a product. Our customers want our product, they want it yesterday, both features and fixes.

So what’s the best way to deliver value to the company and customer? To be honest, I may not know the best way, but I know we will do our best to do whatever it takes. I and my coworkers strive to find reasonable solutions in a reasonable time.

But the zealots cry out and tell you what you are doing wrong, not doing right. What they don’t understand is that if they want to be heard they have to show the value in the changes. You need to give the agile concepts breathing room. This is what really encourages adoption. Agile zealots need to understand why there is resistance, understand people’s concerns and address them, and believe me they will embrace the positive elements.

On the other side, why listen to these zealots? Because if you can get past the worship and hype, there is value in what they describe. If you listen, you can figure out what elements will be useful.

Agile really is an evolutionary model. Agile isn’t about anarchy or cowboy developers, but about adopting processes that improve on process management. Agile really helps break logjams where problems seemed intractable or a great unknown, places where development has struggled for decades over thinking problems only to have their solutions fall flat and disappoint customers.

Lean Development has a great focus on continuous refinement. Focus on problem areas and work to make it a little better. After you’ve done this take another look and make it a little better somewhere else. Very quickly the improvements add up.

And Continuous Integration keeps simple problems simple, resolving them in a timely manner. CI keeps developers from sitting on problems further compounding integration, testing and deployment.

There are values that are worth a look in all of these movements. Take what they give you, find the value and use it. Continuous Integration makes your life better. Problems are found (and hopefully fixed) when they happen, not weeks later. You are getting continuous feedback on the health of your project, not monthly or weekly feedback. If your life is better you can spend more time providing value to your company and your customers. If you deal with less pain you have more time to solve the problems you should be solving. And adding the features that your customers are waiting for and wanted yesterday.

What are you waiting for? Don’t be discouraged thinking you aren’t using CI ‘correctly’. Take elements and make them work for you, and the value will come quickly.