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When Agile Projects Go Bad
blackbearnh writes "CIO Magazine has an article up looking at some of the ways that Agile projects can fail, or Agile can be misapplied in organizations. Some of the issues raised may not be new, but folks might want to pay special attention to these, since the people throwing the stones are two of the original Agile Manifesto signatories, Alistair Cockburn and Kent Brock. From the article: 'Once individuals become familiar with Agile, either through training or practice, they can become inflexible and intolerant of people new to the process. Cockburn has seen this in action. "I'm one of the authors of the manifesto, so if I say something 'weird,' they can't tell me I don't understand Agile. But if someone else — and it doesn't matter how many years of experience they have — says something funny, they get told they don't understand Agile."'" Here's another recent article by the same author on the perils now besetting Agile.
Hello, McFly! It's Kent Beck, not Brock.
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Actually, it's pronounced Coburn because he's from Scotland and apparantly that's how they pronounce it there. He starts nearly every talk by explaining how to say it correctly :)
It's intellectually lazy, without proof that XP techniques are more effective than other systems development methods. They rely on repeated assertion and abuse of people who dare to ask them to prove their case.
This book gives a good overview of the case against XP.
http://www.amazon.com/Extreme-Programming-Refactored-Case-Against/dp/1590590961/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1227079014&sr=8-1
Some of my favourite XP cultist quotes :
"Unacknowledged fear is the source of all software project failures"
"Extreme programmers are not afraid of oral documentation"
"Dependencies between requirements are more a matter of fear than reality"
"I think maybe concentration is the enemy"
no, I've done both and they are very different.
If your impression is that agile methods are directionless then you have met poor practitioners or read negatively selective descriptions. It actually quite rigorous, but on other axes than traditional methods. They focus on process and feedback and controlling uncertainty as you go rather than pretending you can plan away uncertainty.
Of course like any buzzword it attracts unwarranted 'namedropping' use, and like any subculture it attracts overzealous idiots who just want to be 'part of it' and look down on others. But that doesn't really say a lot about what it can offer or not.
sudo ergo sum
Agreed; Agile is a specific methodology that is quite orderly and efficient.
Too often, though, sloppy managers let the project run wild, zero specs, zero plans, do what you feel like doing how you feel like doing it, the deadline is yesterday, so there's no time to plan anything, the customer is our alpha-tester - and they call it "agile development" because "total brothel development" doesn't have the right ring in the name. And people who see such projects really believe this is what Agile is all about.
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I'm reading lot's of ragging on Agile here. Maybe you guys should actually f*cking read the agile manifesto. It's only a few sentences after all. You'll notice that it's actually quite a good thing that tries to rid the software devprocess of bloat and get close to the people for whom software is written.
Whenever I've used agile with the right people, it was a breeze getting the job done. It's basically common-sence systematically applied to software developement in my book.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
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