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Why Your Users Hate Agile
Esther Schindler writes "What developers see as iterative and flexible, users see as disorganized and never-ending. This article discusses how some experienced developers have changed that perception. '... She's been frustrated by her Agile experiences — and so have her clients. "There is no process. Things fly all directions, and despite SVN [version control] developers overwrite each other and then have to have meetings to discuss why things were changed. Too many people are involved, and, again, I repeat, there is no process.' The premise here is not that Agile sucks — quite to the contrary — but that developers have to understand how Agile processes can make users anxious, and learn to respond to those fears. Not all those answers are foolproof. For example: 'Detailed designs and planning done prior to a project seems to provide a "safety net" to business sponsors, says Semeniuk. "By providing a Big Design Up Front you are pacifying this request by giving them a best guess based on what you know at that time — which is at best partial or incorrect in the first place." The danger, he cautions, is when Big Design becomes Big Commitment — as sometimes business sponsors see this plan as something that needs to be tracked against. "The big concern with doing a Big Design up front is when it sets a rigid expectation that must be met, regardless of the changes and knowledge discovered along the way," says Semeniuk.' How do you respond to user anxiety from Agile processes?"
He says it quite nicely:
http://martinfowler.com/bliki/FlaccidScrum.html
Of course that was in 2009. Nothing has changed, and I've long past the point of being fed up with the non-technical fuck-tards that think they can sprinkle Scrum-dust on a mountain of technical debt and it'll go away. This is usually done in the presence of a stable of bad developers who lack the discipline to do the actual hard work of the XP practices that deliver good products in the first place.
The parent article author can STFU already. It just reeks of, "Wah! My agile hurts me because I won't do the hard stuff".
Oh, and while your at it agile wimps: stop fucking trying to do "distributed agile" with fucking China and fucking India in order to save 30% on what's already a crap-pile due to communication problems. It's not going to help one bit.
Also, get off my lawn...
*** Sigs are a stupid waste of bandwidth.
The customer thinks they are ordering a building, metaphorically speaking. They can walk around it in their heads, see the color of the drapes, measure the windows, there are quantifiable costs. You don't build things using agile techniques however. "Well, we'll put this skyscraper about here. Start digging and we'll see how she goes."
"The big concern with doing a Big Design up front is when it sets a rigid expectation that must be met, regardless of the changes and knowledge discovered along the way," says Semeniuk.' How do you respond to user anxiety from Agile processes?"
How? Don't even talk about agile to the customer. Can you imagine a surgeon... "Well we'll just start cutting and figure it from there" no no, talk about outcome, not process. Agile talk is for the operating room, not the waiting room.
Almost everyone's doing it wrong, that's why it doesn't seem to work in practice. 99% of the "agile" efforts I've seen used agile as an excuse to avoid whatever part of the SDLC annoyed them most.
If you're not doing Xtreme Agile, you're not doing Agile right.
Or at least that's what I keep hearing from all the Agilistas. They also tend to claim that any failed "Agile" project must have been doing Agile wrong, because by definition, Agile processes deliver useful working software at frequent intervals -- and they don't see the problem in defining "real" Agile processes based on an outcome rather than the processes used beforehand.
The problem with Agile is that it gives too much freedom to the customer to change their mind late in the project and make the developers do it all over again.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
It frequently is. It doesn't matter what methodology you use- if you change major features/priorities at the last minute it will cost multiple times as much. Yet frequently customers expect it to be cheap because "we're agile". And by accepting that change will happen you don't push the customers to make important decisions early, ensuring that major changes will happen, instead of just being possible.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
Business unit: We want XYZ, We have a budget of $x and we want it done by July 1st.
IS Department: You see this is a math problem. XYZ costs $y not $x. You can't come and tell us exactly what you want to have done and exactly what you are going to pay. You can tell us one or the other and we'll provide the opposing data.
Business unit: That's not acceptable, and what about the date?!?
IS Department: We literally have no idea how long this or any project will take.
Business unit: We need hard facts! We need to claim our project is affordable and will be done by our arbitrary date! We need you to lie to us!
IS Department: Ok, well, we'll use a method called "Agile" and we'll completely make up some time and costs estimates. But the whole point of Agile is that we'll revise these dozens of times during the project so that, in the end, we can claim that our estimates are accurate because we basically just made them match what they actually ended up being at the end of the project. We will blame you for the overruns in our documentation, and you will blame us in yours. Then, in some meeting somewhere we'll generally complain that all projects over-run estimates by an average of 200% and gloss over the fact that this basically proves estimates are completely made up and are of no use at all.
Business unit: Perfect!