Agile Misunderstood
Agile is one of the most misunderstood concepts in the software industry these days. It is often marketed as a lightweight, lean, software delivery methodology. Agile is touted as an efficient and new “way” of developing software that will help you deliver software faster, saving you a lot of money.
Agile these days is synonymous with SCRUM, Extreme Programming(XP), Kanban(some people rightly recognize this as more of a lean technique than Agile) to name a few frameworks that are a means of realizing the gains of Agile. Unfortunately, these frameworks will not help realize any of the Agile gains if the principles and values articulated by the authors of the agile manifesto are not understood. Agile is NOT daily standups, product backlogs, sprints, sprint reviews, scrum masters and product owners or any of the other “Agile” jargon you hear. If I had a dollar for every time I hear that creating documentation is against Agile or developing first and testing second is against Agile or having specialized roles is against Agile, I would be a very rich man.
Agile, if anything is more of an organization change model than a software development methodology. Agile at it’s core is 4 values and 12 principles that an organization needs to embrace as part of its culture.
These days Agile coaches are advocating a top down Agile implementation approach where executives and leaders are coached on Agile before the software implementation teams are coached. This is the right way to go about transforming an organization to utilizing Agile Software Development Frameworks to develop software products and projects.
It is important for leadership to understand these values and principles and ensure that they’re going to make the difficult decisions to align their organization with these values and principles. Failure to do so will result in failure to successfully implement software using an Agile Framework.
Additionally, not every organization, product or project is a good candidate for Agile. Some products and projects require the rigid, inflexibility of processes, tools, contract management, oversight, etc. that make it extremely difficult to implement using the Agile principles. It is best to not try and implement Agile in such situations as aligning the organization, product or project to an Agile environment will be an expensive affair.
I encourage every organization, executive, project manager or team to put aside all they’ve learned in terms of Agile Implementation frameworks (Scrum, SAFe, Kanban etc.) and focus on understanding the values and principles. Every implementation activity should be receive a “check” when measured against every value and corresponding principle. If it fails to receive a “check”, the implementation activity will not help you realize an Agile gain.
