Of course there has been loads of hype about agile in the software development community. Lots of folks have now been certified as Scrum Masters. I have been involved in agile transformation since 2004/5 when I had a proprietary methodology forced on me from above. Said methodology was brought by a “Management Science” consultant, who incidently was also selling a software product that would help implement said methodology. This same consultant was also married to a signficant client of our firm, and so you can do the math.
Like any other practice, people who have a positive experience with agile, are looking for opportunities to repeat that positive experience. After I rid myself and our firm of the management science consultant and his methodology and his product, I took a long hard look at what he was trying to accomplish. I read some of the broader agile literature. I was looking specifically at the benefits that were being hyped.
Like any other business change program – if you are going to adopt agile practices, you must start by describing the benefits you expect to get. Before you challenge me on business change, let me just smack you down. Software development is a business activity. Whether it is a consulting practice for cash, as a software vendor building a product to sell, or as a company building bespoke systems – software development is a business activity. To adopt a new methodology, life cycle, set of practices, technology stack, etc. is therefore a business change program and should rightly be treated like a business change. That means:
- you don’t start until you are prepared to invest sufficient resources to make the change stick.
- you have to be ready to sell executive management on the investment.
- you have to be able to articulate the benefits you expect to get from the investment.
So what are the benefits that are so overhyped?
1) Productivity – agile practices claim to be “lighter weight” processes, meaning you spend less effort on maintaining the process and more delivering valuable software.
2) Predictability – agile practices claim to deliver greater predictability, meaning that we will know earlier that our plans are reasonable, and have more time to adjust if they are not.
3) Improved Value Delivery – agile practices claim to delivery greater value to the customer, this claim is based on agile tendencies to deliver software capabilities more frequently, which in and of itself, means that the customer starts realizing value from our efforts sooner.
4) Improved Risk Mitigation – agile practices claim to reduce certain types of project risks faster and more effectively than other practices, meaning after the same amount of time an agile project has less remaining risk than otherwise would be true.
In a following series of posts, I would like to describe each of these benefits in more detail, and how I have seen agile practices deliver these benefits. I think that agile practices certainly can deliver these benefits, but I do not believe that there is a guarantee, nor is agile the only way to get these specific benefits.
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