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.

Comments

No way!

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean when a good idea is elevated to an inflexible ideology, it can become a bad idea? This has never, ever happened before. :)

SHOCKA

[kevination]

Bad management leads to bad results, no matter the methodology.

Extremist Programming

[composer777]

We've had quite a few people around my workplace promoting extreme programming and (fr)agile software development. It's not going to replace lack of talent, lack of planning, or not knowing what the true costs of things are. I think many people in management have taken in only the parts that they want to hear, and ignored the rest. The results of this kind of misapplication are fairly obvious.

My biggest objection is the lack of credible proof that it actually works any better than the tried an true software methodologies.

Re:Extremist Programming

[wrook]

My biggest objection is the lack of credible proof that it actually works any better than the tried an true software methodologies.

But can you provide proof that the "tried and true software methodologies" work?

Our biggest problem in process improvement is that we can't easily measure productivity. If we could, then it would be a walk in the park to determine if one way of doing things was better than another. Instead we can say that project A was successful at meeting its targets while project B was not. Even then management always games the system to claim that their projects were successful. How else would they get promoted?

Lately I've been hearing from a lot of people who claim to agree with agile principles and therefore feel that they must be agile. Whether or not they actually achieve results seems to be secondary. A good example would be, does your team *actually* welcome changing requirements? If not, then I would argue that you aren't agile.

If you read through the agile principles and think to yourself, what would you do to actually achieve this, I hope that people start to realize that becoming agile isn't trivial. In fact, I think many people would argue that it's impossible. Having worked on a couple of teams that were actually agile in this respect, I disagree.

I think scepticism is healthy. But when we're comparing development methodologies it's hard to find ways of comparison. Even though I'm retired from professional programming, if I were to take it up again I wouldn't work in a more traditional setting. Especially one of the XP teams I worked on, while not being particularly exceptional in terms of talent, was one of the most amazing experiences of my career. I highly recommend others to try to get the same feeling. But it is by no means easy.

Cockburn?

[BountyX]

Cockburn has seen this in action.

I have personally experienced cockburn and assure you will become "become inflexible and intolerant".

Buzzword Boredom

[Anonymous Coward]

In my thirty years of design and programming on projects big and small, high level to low, I've seen this crap come and go. It's always more or less the same, and it's always instigated/pushed/proposed by those who cannot code, or those who are looking for something to do besides code.

Re:pft

[SharpFang]

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.

You guys were using Scrum the wrong way

[Qbertino]

Just reading your post shows me that you guys where using scrum the wrong way. Most people don't understand the true purpose of Scrum. We do Scrums every day at 11:30 and they take about a minute ot two per team-member (just did todays and I'm checking on slashdot while adding my new tickets to mantis).

Scrums are stand-up meetings. Everybody stands and keeps his turn short. You say what you where doing since yesterday, what you achieved and what you are going to do today. It's mostly about self-awareness and being able to judge your capacities - it's a mental exercise, not a classic meeting (we have those too, but only like once every 8 weeks).

Agile came out of the need to deal with controll-freaks who didn't do their homework and tend to weigh down things that should be lighweight with to much bureaucracy. Where human interfacing is a key point of your software, Agile is a very good method to handle things. If the pipeline has skilled people at each section, that is. Our company is technology driven with managers that actually wrote code at some point in their career. I'd call our process somewhat agile - we get changes every odd week - and everybody deals with it without a single hitch. ... Coming to think of it, maybe that's why we dominate our market.

Bottom line:
You guys got Scrum and Agile all wrong. Maybe you should've steared clear from the get go.

yes, but here it's funnier

[Moraelin]

There isn't one of them that doesn't have individuals that follow the processes blindly.

Yes, but here it's funnier, since you were supposed to trust it without any proof, and in fact in spite of proof to the contrary, from the start.

Since the topic is agile projects gone bad, you only need to look at the original Chrysler C3 project that became the poster child for XP: from Chrysler's point of view, the project was an abject failure. By the time it was _years_ overdue, it still hadn't delivered a tenth of the promises. At least one of the managers involved as client-representative in that project got stress-related health problems during it. Chrysler not only cancelled the project, but forbade XP. It's something you'd normally call "EPIC FAIL!" as projects go.

But in true CCCP fashion, a failure got redefined into a smashing success, and presented as such in the books. In fact, turned into the poster child for successful XP.

So there we have our answer already: when XP projects go bad, failure gets redefined as a smashing success.

Later studies into, well, how much better _is_ pair programming, actually showed that such a pair is somewhat better than a single programmer for inexperienced freshman year programmers, but barely marginally better than a single programmer when done with experienced programmers. Both cases delivered actually less than the two programmers working separately on different parts of the problem.

Again, it won't stop anyone from still pretending that it's the opposite.

XP also redefined what "bug" is, by pretending that only stuff caught by the client's automated tests are bugs. Hence, if your tests for my "int add(int x, int y)" method only test for x = 2 and y = 3, and the whole method is just a "return 5;", it's not buggy. If you wan it changed, that's a change request, mate.

Hence making possible the claim that XP delivers 100% bug-free code. Now, if you want to redefine what "bug" means, you could do the same for any other methodology, but XP zealots like to ignore that. (I mean, seriously, if "not caught by the acceptance tests" doesn't mean "bug", then Windows 3.0 was 100% bug free too. Dumbly enough it was only tested internally on identical Compaq computers, but it ran flawlessly on those and with the particular software mix used in the test. If it doesn't work on your computer, though, XP would call it a change request.)

So, heh, it's mildly funny to hear the same guys who did that reality redefinition complain about others doing the same.

Seriously, it reminds me of a joke by Vince Ebert, translated loosely from memory: If you think there's a beer in the fridge and go look, that's science. If you think there's a beer in the fridge but don't look, that's religion. And if you look, see there's no beer, and still think there's a beer in the fridge, that's esotheric.

That's what XP is: something that started as a religion, and ended up an esotheric cult.

This is actually where XP/Agile have a major advantage over other more formal processes - the Agile processes try not to promote rigid thinking and if applied correctly should be self-correcting or applied in more than just name only (but you would know that if you had read TFA).

I'll be the first to say that flexible thinking is great, and that XP even has some good ideas. The point where it fails is that "turning all the knobs to 10", to quote the authors.

Essentially what they do is discovering something like "hey, some salt in a soup tastes nice, and a bit of vinegar makes it even better"... and from there formalizing an ideology in which all soup is done only with salt and vinegar. In fact, by boiling a kilo of salt in 5 litres of vinegar, since that's the turning all knobs to the max point.

Re:Measuring productivity

[MadKeithV]

I think the most effective test would be to keep throwing terrible programmers at a problem and see which methodology fails the least badly.
Because in real life you rarely find enough of the top 10%-ers to do all the work that needs to be done.