When Agile becomes Fragile due to the WaterFAIL taking over

As a developer I think most of us enjoy an Agile workflow, it really caters to us. Previously we were always at the bottom of the hill, and shit rolls downhill. With waterfall methodology if the planning and design take longer than expected the hard-deadline doesn’t change, leaving us to work nights and weekends. Agile should give us a chance to get involved from the getgo along with everyone involved, point out issues, suggest improvements, lend our experience to the project. If new features are requested no problem we add them to the board; we adapt with agility. What happens when your team tries to be Agile but Waterfall methodology is lingering in the background and ultimately in control?

A lot of times if you aren’t working in a devoted software development company this is the case. It usually happens in my experience because clients aren’t really aware what Agile is. It’s not their responsibility to, they just want the end product as they specify. It’s our job to educate them on the benifits of working Agile. It’s our job to help them shape their product; because to be honest they might not know exactly what they need. We are the experts. You might ask them is this site for you? They would of course reply, yes. Then ask them again is this site for you, or is it for your customers, end users, other people? Which they will change their tune to well yes it’s for the users. To Qoute Chris Lema from a WordPress conference I attended in Cape Town, “It’s for your client’s client”.

I get excited when I hear a project will be run Agile, I get out my little colourful post-it notes. I do a planning session where we break down stories and the whole kit and caboodle. We let the Project Manager and SCRUM master decide the important stories for the sprint. Then go at it for one sprint. Usually after this and doing all your tickets is where Waterfall starts to haunt your dreams. There is talk about hard deadlines, more features, and requests for things that weren’t in the sprint to be done at the same time?

Hard deadlines are usually fine with Agile but it is obvious that either Features need to be cut or Quality of code. What if there is no more room to cut either, I’m writing the crappiest code, unmaintainable I’ve ever seen, hell I don’t add a Humans.txt with my name on it. This is what happens when you introduce requests like oh the client was hoping to see a full working demo of the app half way through the Sprint. You start to feel like your on the movie set of Office Space, and your boss is like, “Yeah if you could just go ahead and work the weekend, that’d be great”. That’s what happens when waterfall hits Agile, you end up doing more hours and producing worse code then if you had just stuck with Waterfall from the get go, or Agile.

Unfortunately this isn’t your fault, there isn’t a whole lot of power as one of the team and not management you can do. You can just make it transparent that we are going against Agile. The fundemental issue here lies with Client relations not educating the client on how you will work the project. I imagine this is not their fault entirely either because, they probably haven’t recieved enough training on Agile either. I believe it would be a great advantage for whole teams to go on a two day certification course for Agile together. Run through a mock project, get a workflow going and succeed!

Have you had similar experience, Have you never had this trouble before?Would love feedback and any suggestions to improve / implement an Agile workflow.