Agile Myths
As a Stakeholder or Product Owner
I want to understand what the common Agile Myths are
So that I know how to identify them when they are referenced
- Agile is a silver bullet.
- Agile is anti-documentation.
- Agile is anti-planning.
- Agile is undisciplined.
- Agile requires a lot of rework.
- Agile is anti-architecture.
- Agile doesn’t scale.
Agile is a silver bullet
I wish this were true – but it isn’t. You can fail just as spectacularly on an Agile project as you can using any other traditional method. You’ll fail faster using Agile (due to the transparency and visibility it brings) but unfortunately it’s not a silver bullet or an excuse to stop thinking.
There’s nothing inherently magical about Agile. It basically says
Bring your development team and customer as close together as you can, give them what they need, and then get out of the way.
Now if you don’t have people that like being empowered, taking initiative, and getting things done, that’s a different problem. Agile just gives them permission to do their best work and be accountable for the results.
Agile is anti-documentation
Agile isn’t anti-documentation. A more accurate way to say it would be Agile doesn’t do documentation for documentation’s sake.
Documentation gets treated like any other deliverable on an Agile project. It gets estimated, sized, and prioritized like any other user story.
Where Agile pushes back on documentation is as a means of communication. Agile prefers face-to-face communication over relying on the written word.
Agile is anti-planning
Not sure where this one comes from. There’s actually a lot of planning that goes on in Agile projects.
You’ve got your:
- Daily planning with the 10 minute daily standups.
- Bi-weekly planning with the Iteration/Sprint Planning Meetings
- Release planning where team’s decide what to ship every three to four months.
But it wouldn’t be fair to say Agile is anti-planning. If anything it is anti-static planning. Meaning Agilist’s expect their plans to change and use tools like burndown charts to track and make these changes visible.
Agile is undisciplined
When Agile started gaining popularity, its reputation suffered a bit from some teams taking the easy parts of Agile (like attending daily standups) but leaving out the hard (like upfront testing and regularly shipping production ready working software).
The truth is Agile is a very disciplined way of delivering software.
- You have to test.
- You have to get feedback.
- You have to regularly ship software.
- You have to change and update the plan.
- You have to deliver bad news early.
This isn’t easy stuff. It’s not for the faint of heart and requires a lot of hard work, courage, and discipline.
Agile requires a lot of rework
Rework comes in two forms on an Agile project. You’ve got the rework of requirements – customers discovering what they really want. And you’ve got the rework of the software – development teams discover better ways to design the software.
Both need to be balanced and tempered. Just as business can’t indefinitely keep changing their mind, development teams can’t forever keep redesigning the software. At some point we have to ship.
Agile deals with this tension by empowering both sides with the power to iterate, so long as they work within the project’s means.
Burndown charts play in big role in tracking how Agile project are doing. Just as tools like the Agile Inception Deck make sure everyone is on the same page with regards to time and money.
It’s a balancing act not unique to software delivery. Any creative work with a deadline (i.e. plays, movies making, or the publishing of daily papers) faces the same challenges.
The trick is to do the best work you can, with the time and resources you’ve got.
Agile is anti-architecture
Something we got really good at as an industry in the 1990’s was building big, complex, expensive, hard to maintain systems.
Agile pushed back on this over engineering by creating terms like YAGNI (You Aint Gonna Need It) to remind teams to keep things simple until proven otherwise.
That doesn’t mean Agile teams stop thinking, or don’t leverage previous experiences.
It’s more an attitude that the best way to build systems is to keep things simple, and only add the complexity when you need it.
Agile doesn’t scale
Agile scales like any other software delivery process. Not that well.
Look – scaling is hard. There is no easy way to magically coordinate, communicate, and keep large groups of people all moving in the same direction towards the same cause. It’s hard work.
The one thing Agile does bring to the conversation, is instead of looking for ways to scale up your project, look for ways to scale things down.
In other words, if we know we are really good at delivering with small, nimble, agile teams of ten, why don’t we structure our work that way. More on this here.
AgileBI Overview Articles
SFT – The art of Innovation – break it and then fix it
Innovation is a popular word these days in business. Good old Wikipedia defines it as "Innovation is the application of better solutions that meet new requirements, inarticulated needs, or existing market needs." But being innovative is not simple. And often the...
Day 1 – Overview, Vision, Scope and Accountability
So day one is down and it was a day of setting the vision and starting the definition of the scope (the Dev team were off sick, so it was only a 1/2 a day) The Process The day started with a quick whiteboard overview of the entire Agile Scrum Framework and this...
I’m getting flexible – a week of Agile ahead
I love learning new stuff! The six months I spent at Xero has probably been my most intensive learning experience I have had, and in retrospect it was due to the fact it was total immersion, completely focussed on delivery (having Rod Drury walking the floor behind...
Dynamic Data Driven Urls coming in SAS VA 6.3
Kathryn has just spent part of last week mentoring a SAS VA customer in Australia. We love this type of work because we help out customers help themselves (rather than black boxing delivery and forcing them to pay us for every change) and because we always learn new...
SFT – Watch the end of the runway
Often in a project we focus on the wrong things. Lets look at a project with the goal of building a plane that will take off. The challenge is that while we are building the plane it is slowly moving towards the end of the runway. Once we run out of runway the...
SFT – What is cloud computing?
Cloud computing is the latest buzz word and in true IT style, we have invented a raft of TLA's to explain what it is (and isn't) as well as a myriad of versions to confuse people even more. PaaS, IaaS, SaaS, DaaS, public cloud, private cloud, hybrid cloud, BIaaS, How...
SFT – Don’t complain, suggest something better
When you find something you don't like a natural reaction is to complain. The people you complain to will often listen politely, but they won't typically do anything about it. (Unless you have something they really want, that they will lose if they don't rectify what...
SFT – Its not the idea, its the execution
Your idea probably isn't unique. But then again you probably haven't found anybody that has done it the way you plan to do it. So don't spend your time asking people to sign NDA's or telling them half of the story. Just go execute on it. If you not sure, or need help,...
Deloitte Fast50 2013 – Infographic
So have you heard that the Deloitte Fast50 for 2013 has been announced and we came 22nd 😉 Check out our Badge Well one of the cool things about the Fast50 is that there are a myriad of different companies, doing different things and all at different stages of their...