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5 of the Biggest Misconceptions about Agile

If you’ve worked in the tech industry for any length of time, you’ve probably heard the term agile being bandied about. But what exactly does it mean to be agile?

Essentially, in the tech world, agility refers to solutions that evolve from collaboration between self-organizing, cross-functional teams. Agile software development started back in the 1990s with several methodologies that emphasized collaboration between the development team and business stakeholders. At the time, this kind of collaboration was pretty unheard of.

Because the agile development process itself is borne through continual change and improvements, people are still confused as to what agile is and what it is not. Below you’ll find several of the most common misconceptions people have about agile software development that we’ve gathered through the years.

5 Agile Methodology Misconceptions

  1. Teams don’t have to worry about their cycle time. This is a big no-no. Cycle time refers to how long it takes to put something on the backlog before the team releases it for customer use. Tracking cycle time will help you discover delays throughout the process, whether they’re due to your team having too much work in progress or to another department holding up your team.
  2. Managers ask people to multitask instead of managing one project portfolio. While this statement may have been true in the time of waterfall reports, it couldn’t be farther from the truth now. Back in the “old days,” it was easier to rotate team members on and off projects as needed. But today, multitasking shouldn’t be considered the norm. In fact, it’s one of the fastest ways to waste time. Multitasking divides teams (and focus!), and teams need to be kept together.
  3. Agile = Scrum. This is one of the biggest misconceptions in regards to agile processes. Scrum is one way to “do” agile, but it is in no way equivalent to agile. Agile is a way of thinking, embodied by the twelve principles in the Manifesto, while Scrum is simply a project management framework designed to implement agile principles and values. So the next time you hear a coworker referring to “agile/Scrum,” you can step in and correct them.
  4. Agile is a new thing. Actually, agile has been around for a long time; its roots trace back to the 1980s. What we now know as agile software development came to be with the penning of the Agile Manifesto in 2001. It revolves around four main values: individuals and interactions over processes and tools; working software over comprehensive documentation; customer collaboration over contract negotiation; and responding to change over following a plan.
  5. Agile is the answer to everything. Agile is in no way a silver bullet. It isn’t easy to implement, and it doesn’t have an immediate effect. The thing about agile is that it’s a real heads-up way of thinking about and approaching technology, including software development. Even though agile can be applied in a big-bang approach, the real transforming capability is something that takes place over a longer period of time.

Now that you know a little more about what agile is and what it is not, we hope you’ll have success when you decide to implement it in your own organization. And if you don’t plan on implementing it in your own organization, we hope you found some aspects to apply to your everyday life.

Related Resources

If you like what you read and found our overview of Agile misconceptions to be helpful, we encourage you to recommend it and share it with others! If you’re hungry to learn more about Agile project management, we’ve compiled a list of resources below to help further your knowledge. It’s full of articles about Agile project management and how it can help — and sometimes hurt — your company.

Are you struggling with Agile project management or would you like to know more about a specific part of the process? Let us know in the responses section below! If you learned something new or found the answers that you were looking for, we’d love to hear about that too.