Friday Philosophy – Why doesn’t Agile work?

Why doesn’t Agile Development Methodology seem to work?

I’m going say right here at the start that I like much of what is in Agile, for many, many years I’ve used aspects of Rapid Application Development {which Agile seems to have borrowed extensively from} to great success. However, after my post last week on database design, many of the comments were quite negative about Agile – and I had not even mentioned it in my post!

To nail my flag to the post though, I have not seen an Agile-managed project yet that gave me confidence that Agile itself was really helping to produce a better product, a product more quickly and most certainly not a final system that was going to be easy to maintain. Bring up the topic of Agile with other experienced IT people and I would estimate 90% of the feedback is negative.

That last point about ongoing maintenance of the system is the killer one for me. On the last few projects I have been on where the culture was Agile-fixated I just constantly had this little voice in my head going:

“How is anyone going to know why you did that in six months? You’ve just bolted that onto the side of the design like a kludge and it really is a kludge. When you just said in the standup meeting that we will address that issue ‘later’, is that the same “later” that accounts for the other half-dozen issues that seem to have been forgotten?”.

From what I can determine after the fact, that voice turns out to be reason screaming out against insanity. A major reason Agile fails is that it is implemented in a way that has no consideration for post-implementation.

Agile, as it is often implemented, is all about a headlong rush to get the job done super-quick. Ignore all distractions, work harder, be completely focused and be smarter. It really does seem to be the attitude by those who impose Agile that by being Agile your staff will magically come up with more innovative solutions and will adapt to any change in requirements just because they work under an agile methodology. Go Agile, increase their IQ by 10 points and their work capacity by 25%. Well, it doesn’t work like that. Some people can in fact think on their feet and pull solutions out of thin air, but they can do that irrespective of the methodology. People who are more completer-finishers, who need a while to change direction but boy do they produce good stuff, have you just demoralized and hamstrung them?Agile does not suit the way all people work and to succeed those people it does not suit need to be considered.

The other thing that seems to be a constant theme under Agile is utterly knackered {sorry, UK slang, knackered means tired, worn out and a bit broken} staff. Every scrum is a mad panic to shove it all out of the door and people stop doing other things to cope. Like helping outside the group or keeping an eye on that dodgy process they just adopted as it needed doing. Agile fails when it is used to beat up team. Also, I believe Agile fails when those ‘distractions’ are ignored by everyone and work that does not fall neatly into a scrum is not done.

I suppose it does not help that my role has usually been one that is more Production Support than development and Agile is incompatible with production support. Take the idea of the scrum, where you have x days to analyse, plan, design, unit test and integrate the 6 things you will do in this round. On average I only spend 50% of my time dealing with urgent production issues, so I get allocated several tasks. Guess what, if I end up spending 75% of my time that week on urgent production issues, and urgent production issues have to take priority, I can screw up the scrum all on my own. No, I can’t pass my tasks onto others in the team as (a) they are all fully assigned to their tasks and (b) passing over a task takes extra time. Agile fails when it is used for the wrong teams and work type.

I’ve come to the conclusion that on most projects Agile has some beneficial impact in getting tasks done, as it forces people to justify what they have done each and every day, encourages communication and gives the developers a reason to ignore anything else that could be distracting them as it is not in the scrum. Probably any methodology would help with all of that.

My final issue with Agile is the idiot fanatics. At one customer site I spent a while at, they had an Agile Coach come around to help the team to become more agile. I thought this was a little odd as this team was actually doing a reasonable job with Agile, they had increased productivity and had managed to avoid the worst of the potential negative impacts. This man came along and patronisingly told us we were doing OK, but it was hard for us to raise our game like this, we just needed help to see the core values of Agile and, once we did, once we really believed in it, productivity would go up 500% {That is a direct quote, he actually said “productivity will go up by 500%”}. He was sparkly-eyed and animated and full of the granite confidence of the seriously self-deluded. I think he managed to put back the benefits of Agile by 50%, such was the level of “inspiration” he gave us. Agile fails when it is implemented like a religion. It’s just a methodolgy guys.

I find it all quite depressing as I strongly suspect that, if you had a good team in a positive environment, doing a focused job, Agile could reap great rewards. I’m assured by some of my friends that this is the case. {update – it took my good friend Mike less than an hour to chime in with a comment. I think I hit a nerve}.