tldr; check out the 1hr video below on Programmer Anarchy, it's really good.
I'm not sure how many of you guys work in big companies that have been bitten by the Agile programming methodologies lately but the last few places I worked were very big into doing some form of SCRUM, *DD, etc. Now as a whole I don't object to doing things quicker and having a fast feedback cycle but it seems very difficult for companies to get it right which to me says the methodologies smell of BS if not easily adopted. Anyways, I've been arguing lately that if you get a talented group of people together and tell them what you want, they'll get stuff done without the need for all of the process and formalities and it's amazing what a small group of really talented folk can do when "business" gets out of their way.
I was joking around with a coworker this week because we're supposed to be doing this BDD stuff for the latest project we're on and I'm very much against writing tests first and testing everything and writing English sentences that really are only for silly product people that don't really know what they're doing. BDD is over a year old now in the main stream and I laughingly said isn't it about time we had some new methodology that everyone is supposed to be blindly following now and spending a bunch of money on consultants to tell them they're doing everything wrong and there's this better way. And he responded with Accelerated Agile. So after a bit of searching, I think I found a similar concept (Programmer Anarchy) that I might actually be able to get behind as a development philosophy. I watched this video today and largely agree with just about everything in it, so much so that I may actually start trying to push the concept.
Anyways, it's long but well worth watching I think.