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World's Biggest 'Agile' Software Project Close To Failure
00_NOP writes "'Universal Credit' — the plan to consolidate all Britain's welfare payments into one — is the world's biggest 'agile' software development project. It is now close to collapse, the British government admitted yesterday. The failure, if and when it comes, could cost billions and have dire social consequences. 'Some steps have been taken to try to rescue the project. The back end – the benefits calculation – has reportedly been shifted to a "waterfall" development process – which offers some assurances that the government at least takes its fiduciary duties seriously as it should mean no code will be deployed that has not been finished. The front end – the bit used by humans – is still meant to be “agile” – which makes some sense, but where is the testing? Agile is supposed to be about openness between developer and client and we – the taxpayers – are the clients: why can’t we see what our money is paying for?'"
Agile assumes you have smart, talented, dedicated individuals doing the work. Then again if you have that pretty much anything works.
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
...since there is daily accountability and you're working on smaller pieces.
So that means it's impossible to do anything big or that requires extended planning? Sometimes a developer needs to be left alone for a week to come up with something good. Regimenting the process into days and forcing a daily bullshit update is just abusive to the creative process.
Just because you're agile, doesn't mean you crap daisies and unicorns. I often see inept upper managers latch onto agile as the latest magic bullet which will solve all their problems with no other changes on their part. Except they keep all the micromanagement bits, discard all the engineer empowerment bits and hand their scrum team a year's worth of priority 1 stories to implement in the next sprint. Good managers will likely be successful no mater what methodology they use, bad ones will likely fail no matter what methodology they use and the ones in between will have mixed results no matter what methodology they use.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
All Agile methodologies really are are different ways of implementing the Spiral Model of development. If used correctly, any of them can work fine. Unfortunately, that's only in theory. In practice, Agile generally becomes an excuse to use Code and Fix, which is the worst methodology and the most prone to failure. Beware anyone who claims that Agile is the solution to anything.
The most important thing is tight iterations. If a 2 week sprint fails, then it is not that big of a deal. If a 2 year death march fails? Someone's getting fired, since its the equivalent in agile-land of failing 52 sprints straight.
But is it two weeks sprint down a dead end? For a project this size, agile is like trying to build a skyscraper first as a one story building, then two story building, then three story building and so on. Apparently you're making great progress the first sprint and you have a shack up, that's 1/100 floors done already. Except it doesn't work like that, so sometime around the 20th floor you've got people all over the first 19 trying to build in extra support columns and stronger walls and propping up the foundation. Things grind to a halt and you're not making any real progress. Then the orders come to get moving and you start going upwards again more and more rickety until eventually you find the straw that broke the mule's back and it all comes crumbling down.
Agile is nice if you're close enough you can start delivering actual features that would belong in the end product at the end. In practice it often means you build the first iteration with string and duct tape planning to replace it with something more solid on the back end in time, but I think everyone knows how that goes - the string and duct tape has a tendency to stay because that part is "done". Of course hindsight is always much easier but agile I feel lacks foresight, we do this now to meet our sprint goals and then if we need to change something to meet our next sprint goals, we'll deal with that then. In practice, there's not time to go back and rework things every time you figure out this should have been done differently.
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The benefits it promises come only from the synthesis of ALL its components.
Yes, yes, we've heard it a thousand times, if an agile project fails, it must not have been truly agile. Probably isn't a true Scotsman, either.
An "agile" project cannot fail and cost Billions because it must always deliver runnable software with a maximum of a few weeks delay if you use some "semi agile" process like scrum or immediately any point if you use some true agile process.
The trouble is, you can have software that runs and passes some tests, yet still does not meet all of the mandatory requirements for the project and therefore may have no value at all in the real world. You don't get any credit for meeting 90% of the mandatory requirements on a job like this. The idea that having software that runs and maybe passes some tests has some sort of inherent value might be the biggest fallacy perpetuated by the whole Agile movement. It's just not true, and therefore neither is the claim that agile projects can't fail as a result.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.