Paul Hinks' Blog

Every company I have worked at for the last 5 years has tried to implement some kind of Agile development process. It seems to be the new mantra, the silver bullet of software development, similar to the way Object-Oriented Programming was ten, no wait fifteen years ago. Of course OOP was a development methodology and Agile is more of a management process, but that in many ways makes it more appealing to managers since they can understand it better. Each company I have seen seems to have taken different parts of the process and incorporated them in different ways into their existing process. All have had some kind of meeting which they called a scrum, usually an existing meeting with a new name. Most have instigated “sprints”, usually of 2 weeks, to implement suitably small pieces of functionality. Usually the enthusiasm wears off fairly quickly, often when a major re-write is required or something else that doesn’t fit the model and daily meetings are reduced to people repeating the same thing every day for weeks on end. Which is fine by me. I’m sure the whole Agile thing is perfectly appropriate for some sub-set of environments and projects, but for those that it isn’t it’s really painful to try to make it work. And I really dislike doing something because somebody thinks I ought to be doing it. Plus it makes me feel like a Toyota factory worker singing the company song in the morning. I don’t think the development process at any of these places was broken before they were “agile”, and I don’t think any of them were significantly better while it was. If a project is well managed and the lines of communication between different stakeholders are open (which they should be) then a project is generally successful. If it isn’t and they aren’t then it generally won’t be, and it will take more than a few buzzwords to fix it. Keeping a team lean and focused is important, if you have to focus on that then go ahead and implement Agile. If you’re already lean and focused, and delivering, then it ain’t broke – don’t fix it.
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