Agile’s PR problem: People who don’t do it right
Jim Shore recently posted an interesting entry on his blog, entitled “The Decline and Fall of Agile.”
It’s a well thought-out and genuine argument, and I agree with him (except maybe for using the “decline and fall of agile” fear tactic/traffic-booster).
And he’s right: Agile is going to have a PR problem.
Scrum allows one to teach agile planning without agile engineering. Sure, sometimes you can’t fix everything at once. When you go into an organization that is doing up-front planning (but not really since the requirements always change) and teach them to do agile, if you can get them to at least execute Scrum (but not really) you have improved the situation.
Are they going to struggle if they aren’t doing XP practices? Hell, yes. Some of them evolve a little to automate their tests and many evolve to Water Scrum (a waterfall life-cycle during the sprint: two weeks development, then two weeks of “stabilization for testing.” Terrible stuff really, but they do a lot of planning just like Jim said. And that’s an improvement because they have closer to truth about the state of things).
Also, I have been involved in agile rollouts that teach both Scrum and XP. It’s really expensive to the organization to do booth, both in time and money. I’m with Jim in saying that it’s going to be cheaper in the long haul, but it does create a high barrier to winning business.
The existence of consulting gigs to make Agile teams better is a better situation for the client because their mistakes are costing them less.
March 4th, 2009 at 3:55 pm
Isn’t this true of every human practice?
Religion, Education, Basketball, Love, War, etc.
This not doing it right is the fun of doing it! Why just the other day I didn’t do a telemark turn correctly and took a hell-of-a face plant on a black diamond run. Shook me up so much that I went back to something I could do well–a nice blue slope, practice some more and went back to the “expert” slope later with no problems. Why do they call it an “expert” slope–I’m no expert, just put in enough time and energy to get good at it–that’s easy for something you love.