Scott Ambler of IBM speaks about the benefits of the Agile development methodology, and also offers his thoughts as to why there is a reluctance among some application developers to go Agile.

It’s not really a technology issue or a domain issue. People have these excuses to not change, because change is hard. It’s not a technology thing, but it is a culture thing. You have to choose more discipline. One of the big cultural challenges in the traditional community is that they confuse bureaucracy with discipline. Bureaucracy is bureaucracy and discipline is discipline. Those are two different things and we need to get away from that. So if you’ve got this culture around this bureaucratic rigour, filling out forms and doing checklists, it’s going to be hard to move towards something quality-focused, value-focused like agile.