I don’t dislike agile. I think Agile is a welcome change if your team’s current method of developing software is “we release every 6 weeks and conduct a UAT, and come up with a detailed plan before we start working, complete with timeline and commitments from the team”, and in those situations I’d shove the nearest copy of The Phoenix project or The Unicorn Project into your hands and say “Let’s give it a go, where you’re going is better than where you’ve been, but it’s going to be a bumpy ride so buckle up.”
And it would be better than the thing you’re doing, and maybe you even decide to keep it.
That’s all fine. No issues there, and in fact there are lots of bits of agile I happen to think are good practices for a team to consider.
But, and this is the important part: Not all teams should ‘do’ agile and all teams that are doing agile but not having the success they are looking for are probably running into a foundational problem with the philosophy of agile itself.
But, to keep this positive, I want to talk for a minute about some of the practices I like that the various agile methodologies tout.
Talking to the folks using your software daily? Seems basic now, but can you imagine 20 years ago? It was revolutionary.
Getting to the point where you can release whenever you want? Besides the immediate benefits, it also means that all of those silly little things you were doing manually are automated, and from a software developer’s perspective automation is akin to godliness.
Ditching the plan at the first sight of trouble? I’m a Big fan, especially since software as a discipline is still in its infancy. We aren’t building bridges where we’re dealing with all known quantities and calculations and domains (not to mention for our purposes the rather iron-clad laws of physics). Software development is still at least one-part magic, and until that’s not the case the ability to ditch the plan at a moment’s notice is a good thing.
What about you? What do you like about agile?
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