Loading ...Agile Development Going Downhill?
Posted by Davy Brion on November 17th, 2008
James Shore (author of the fantastic book: The Art Of Agile Development) wrote a very interesting post on his blog: The Decline And Fall Of Agile. You should definitely read it.
I’m afraid i agree with James. Over the last few years i’ve heard a lot of people saying they were doing Agile development, where in reality they hardly were. To quote James:
But guess which part people adopt? That’s right–Sprints and Scrums. Rapid cycles, but none of the good stuff that makes rapid cycles sustainable.
And this is unfortunately very true. A lot of teams are working in short iterations now, and a lot of teams are doing daily meetings, or scrums, or stand-up meetings. But how many of them are actually committed to the technical practices and principles that enable successful Agile development? Honestly, i’ve never seen one.
I’m a big fan of true Agile development but even in my current job, my last 2 teams haven’t done it ‘completely right’ either. Our results are pretty good though, but i think we can still do much better. I gradually try to introduce more of the principles and practices but it does take some time. But all of these misconceptions about Agile Development that so many people (developers, project managers, management in general) have aren’t really helping. At my current job, those misconceptions are pretty small and they don’t really have a bad influence. In previous situations at clients, i did notice how those misconceptions led to tremendously ineffective situations. Which is pretty sad actually, because sooner or later managers will probably become skeptical of Agile Methodologies. If that leads to people abandoning some of the technical practices and principles, it would be a pretty big loss to the ’cause’.
All in all more reasons to read James’ excellent book i think. If i could legally get away with forcing people to read that book, i would 
November 17th, 2008 at 1:59 pm
[...] Agile Development Going Downhill? (Davy Brion) [...]
November 18th, 2008 at 9:52 am
Hello Davy,
Thanks for sharing the pain with agile. I would like to share my feelings here.
I am doing agile for more than two years now at Code71 and I am developer of the scrum tool called ScrumPad . What I have found is, people get very obsessed with the fact that very early you get to see the working software! This is really enticing for business people. But there are a few pre-requisites and thats where only a few put enough efforts. We have implemented a few here and are trying to get better at it. So far, we are doing TDD (I would say its a 75% TDD), peer reviews, short 2-week sprints and so on. But, I really think if you want to keep rolling every two weeks and without a up-front analysis, your software will not remain ’soft’ after a few iterations. So, its very important to be agile through continuous refactoring and good OO development skills.
And you are right, not many are doing TDD, good OO, reviews and all these prerequisites. Which is bad for agile as a whole.
November 18th, 2008 at 12:53 pm
on the technical level, we do TDD and we try to keep our code clean and keep our technical debt as low as possible. I don’t think we do enough peer-review yet… i’m mostly the one reviewing other people’s code but in the future i’d like to see people sharing that responsibility
Another thing we still need to improve a lot is that there shouldn’t be any notion of code ownership… when tests fail, people often still react “those aren’t my tests/code so i’m not the one who should fix it”. I’m trying to get people to drop that attitude though, although this takes some time.