Dirty dozen scuppers Agile development

Beverley Head
Friday, 16 October 2009 02:06

IT Industry - Development

The fourth destructive act was ignoring the need for appropriate infrastructure to support the Agile process, while number five is not having full planning participation where only part of the team is present. Successful Agile development requires the full involvement of both the business and the IT group working on the challenge.

Number six in the dirty dozen was a product owner who was unable or unwilling to take decisions, while problem number seven arose from poor scrum-masters, who instead of facilitating and supporting the entire team involved in the Agile process, adopted a command and control approach.

In organisations that performed distributed Agile development , which is considerably more challenging than single site development, the lack of an onsite evangelist for the process could also be damaging, as could development teams which lacked authority within the organisation.

The tenth problem was when testing was not conducted early and often enough,  and number 11 arose when organisations held to traditional performance evaluation measures rather than encouraging the 360 degree team evaluation that supported Agile development processes.

The final nail in the coffin for Agile development according to Tabaka was where organisations simply deemed that Agile was all too hard and reverted to the traditional waterfall approach.

Tabaka acknowledged that “change is hard” but indicated to the audience that persisting with a move to Agile development, could, over a period of around two years, start to deliver significant benefits to an organisation – as long as they avoided the 12 actions that she had identified as precursors to Agile failure.