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Impediments to agile development remain


By David Rubinstein
December 1, 2009 —  (Page 1 of 4)
The notion of agile software development has gained near-universal mind share in the eight years since the Agile Manifesto was penned. Meanwhile, adoption keeps ramping up as more organizations look to reap the benefits of getting usable software on time and within budget.

The idea of waterfall development—months of requirements gathering and writing, setting the project scope and estimating its cost and time to completion, writing the code, then throwing it over the wall to QA to make sure it works and does what is intended—seems so, well, last century.

Yet even knowing all this, organizations that are ready to move to agile—or think they are ready to move to agile—still find many impediments and pitfalls on the road to this different approach to software development.

Part of the problem lies with the expectations organizations have when they decide to adopt agile practices. “People tend to dive in with both feet and set up camps with opinions and views” of what they should gain from agile, said Alex Adamopoulos, founder of boutique agile consultancy Emergn.

“The expectations are unrealistic. Years ago, there was a silver bullet mentality toward agile. We spend a lot of time deprogramming people. You can’t have agile purists. You should apply it in an organization where it makes sense.”

Chris Clarke, vice president of product management at CollabNet, called it a “witch’s brew” of agile. “What agile are we talking about? Do we do Scrum prescriptively? A lot of people love the parts they love, but can’t use it as a prescriptive recipe,” he said.

But IBM agile program manager Scott Ambler cautioned that “It’s easy to say, ‘Tailor your agile practices,’ but that assumes you know how to do so. It’s pretty hard to do on your own.”

This might be because organizations are not getting the training and messaging they need from the agile community. “Religion meets reality and stuff happens,” Ambler said.

When and how much?
Even after an organization has a realistic view of what agile can offer, perhaps the biggest roadblock to successful agile development is in the way software projects are scoped and funded. With the waterfall method, customers come to the software maker with a list of features they want in the software. Business analysts then go off for months at a time to turn the business requests into a massive requirements document, and they determine that the software can be built for a certain cost in a certain time frame.

 Related Search Term(s): agile

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