Dirty dozen scuppers Agile development

By Beverley Head
Friday, 16 October 2009 02:06

Development

Around 350 people are attending the first Agile Australia event in Sydney, and in early sessions were warned of the 12 actions that almost inevitably lead to Agile development failing for the enterprise.

Agile development has been gathering pace over the last decade and is increasingly being used by mainstream organisations, such as Suncorp,  Sensis and Lonely Planet in Australia. Unlike the very structured waterfall approach to systems development Agile involves forming teams made up of business people and IT staff which work together under the direction of a so called scrum-master to iteratively develop software.

Intended to allow much nimbler product development, and to permit enterprises to react quickly to changing market conditions, the approach is not without its challenges.

Jean Tabaka, who is a certified scrum-master trainer and an Agile fellow with Rally Software, told delegates at the conference that there were 12 behaviours she had identified that tended to lead to failure of the Agile method.

The first problem was when management simply got out their chequebook and told IT to “do it”, rather than fully engaging with the process, and recognising the deep structural and organisational changes that Agile demands. This was compounded if the enterprise had a culture which did not support and embrace change.

The third problem came from organisations which did not actively review the Agile process and work out what the team was doing well, what was not serving the team and what could be done to improve. Organisations needed to perform regular retrospective analyses of their operations and then act on the findings, said Tabaka.

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