Agile’s Costly Confusions?

According to the article, the report: 

 

Was based on a survey of 200 different companies using agile methods. Participants in the survey were asked how much they knew about the costs of reworking code, what benefits agile provided them and even what the definition of agile was.  

 

Many companies using agile development methods don’t have a clear picture of the long-term rework costs, says Theresa Lanowitz, a Voke analyst who worked on the report.  Forty-four per cent were unable to give a dollar figure. Another 35 per cent couldn’t identify a single benefit of agile, yet were able to name 35 challenges they encountered with the method.  Not only was there confusion about how to apply agile concepts, but there were 100 definitions of what the term even meant, she added. 

 

The report’s conclusion seems to be centered around the idea that businesses grappling with this dilemma found less than optimal value when moving toward a development method that was put in the hands of the development team to control.  Or as the Voke reports asserted, businesses view it as a “mandate to participate in the developer-centric movement called agile”.

 

I tend to agree with one of the critics of the report, Israel Gat from the Cutter Consortium, who maintains that it is up to the business groups to be engaged in the software projects.  In Scrum, this would mean having a solid Project Owner to ensure the business requirements are vetted and prioritize so that the working deliverable captures what is needed by business.  This is what ensures that business gets engaged… at the end of each iteration, they will see their vision realized more and more and you may have to work to disengage them a bit if you’re doing your job right!  

 

And just throwing vague requirements over the wall to developers and expecting them to do be self-organizing and agile without organizational adoption and support is most likely not to succeed.  As the article concludes, it’s not that Agile’s “precepts are difficult to assimilate, but rather that some businesses aren’t committing themselves to learning and applying it”.