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Voke: Confusion abounds over how to use agile



Suzanne Kattau
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July 25, 2012 —  (Page 2 of 3)
Agile done without having a basic understanding of it beforehand can certainly be a problem. Agile, like any new disruptive technology does, is going through a hype cycle, according to Nathan Wilson, principal research analyst at Gartner. “The hype cycle is where a technology goes from being introduced to being at the peak of expectation where everybody thinks it’s the silver bullet that’s going to save the world, to the trough of reality, and then it comes up to a productive light,” he said.

“Right now, we have agile in this ‘trough of disillusionment’ phase where people are trying it, and they’re finding it is maybe not everything they had hoped it was going to be.”

Jez Humble, principal at ThoughtWorks Studios and co-author of “Continuous Delivery,” agreed that companies are often confused by agile or don’t understand how to implement it correctly at first.

If there's confusion about agile, some would argue that it's actually not about the nature of agile. As a set of development team practices, agile is pretty well understood at this point, according to Forrester Research analyst Tom Grant. “I think the bigger source of confusion is the goal for agile. Often, there's a disconnect between what the team understands the goal to be and what people outside the team think the goal should be,” he said.

“For example, while executive management might see agile only as a vehicle for getting to market faster, teams might be adopting agile to deal with quality or customer satisfaction issues.”

Voke’s report also found that the average cost of agile software projects is rising dramatically in spite of smaller development teams working much shorter durations. This, the report says, is due to the rising cost of discovering and fixing defects. But, according to Humble, it is important for organizations to understand that building quality into software is central to lean and agile methodologies, which emphasize the importance of cross-functional teams (including QA and operations).

“Indeed, it was agile practitioners who pioneered engineering practices such as test-driven development, continuous integration and refactoring, which substantially reduce the cost of discovering and fixing defects,” Humble said.



Related Search Term(s): agile, Voke

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Comments


07/26/2012 02:55:53 PM EST

This seems like a one sided piece. You intereviewed an agile consulting shop -- "Throughtworks" for this? Of course they are going to complain about it. Agile did not invent TDD, refactoring etc as opined by the Agile Vendor. Jordan

United StatesJordan


08/16/2012 05:52:17 PM EST

If you'd like to read my full response to Voke's article, it's available here: http://continuousdelivery.com/2012/07/voke-report-agile-delivers-higher-customer-satisfaction-and-quality/

United StatesJez Humble


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