Culture Shift and Change in Process Can Mean Agile Success for IT Development Projects

  Agile   Governance   Knowledge Shelf  

Accept that Agile is not Suitable for all Projects

Having worked with several agile projects, I have found that some software development projects are not suitable for the agile approach. Unfortunately, many practitioners do not believe that this is the case. By accepting that agile is not always suitable, organizations can create the framework and mind-set to identify root causes and changes that will allow them to apply the approach to the right projects. Following are reasons why a project may not be suitable for agile development:

• The project requires modifying the code of complex software applications that were written using unstructured programming practices. This is usually the case with back-end legacy applications that are used by many organizations for end-of-day processing. The components of these applications are tightly coupled. Their process flows oftentimes use unstructured calling mechanisms, such as GOTO statements (statements in a programming language that transfer control from one process to another) and other unstructured calling methods. Unstructured calling methods result in spaghetti-like process flows that are so complex that a significant amount of investigation and validation is required of the coupled components before the feature that is being developed can be completed. As a result of the time spent on investigation and validation, …

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