Guest View: The half-agile path leads nowhere
By Cyndi Mitchell
March 15, 2010 —
(Page 1 of 3)
Almost a decade has passed since much of the influential early material on agile software development was published. In that time, the agile movement has gone from being perceived as undisciplined, impractical and scary, to being front and center on the agenda of a growing number of mainstream IT executives.
Today, there's hardly an IT organization on the planet that isn't using, adopting or thinking about trying an agile approach. There are many things to celebrate about this progression, not least of which is that, as an industry, we are learning a lot about new and better ways to build software.
But where mainstream agile adoption is concerned, we are massively under-delivering on the potential of the Agile movement and, by association, on our potential as software professionals. We are failing to advance good agile engineering practices at anywhere near the pace that we are advancing agile planning practices.
Currently, the typical approach to agile adoption within a large mainstream IT organization starts with introducing some flavor of iterative planning and daily stand-up meetings. Though it's never straightforward, most business and IT stakeholders will eventually grok the value of these practices, and work at them until they achieve some degree of successful implementation.
In contrast, it's often much harder for organizations that are new to agile software development to understand the value of engineering practices like pair programming, test-driven development, refactoring and continuous integration. So simply trying (let alone implementing) these practices is often de-prioritized to a later date, which often never arrives.
There are many people in the industry who will argue that it doesn't matter. They will say that for most organizations, iterative planning is a huge step forward and they should be happy with such an achievement. I do have some sympathy for this view, considering I have seen how hard it is for most organizations to get that far. However, this does not change the simple fact that when we do software development, we end up with software. And the better designed and simpler that software is, the easier it will be to change. If you believe in “responding to change over following a plan,” you will agree that’s pretty important.
Related Search Term(s): agile
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