Agile's ascendancy is in direct response to IT's dolorous history of software project failure, cost overruns and the concomitant business dissatisfaction with traditional IT design and development — the waterfall methodology — in which development slowly cascades through a series of steps including requirements analysis, design, implementation, testing, integration and maintenance. But for a variety of reasons, not everyone has warmed to agile. In fact, just 17 percent of North American and European enterprises use agile development processes, according to Forrester Research's "Enterprise Agile Adoption in 2006" survey.
Farm Credit Services welcomed agile programming because the waterfall method had been failing the organization, as it has many others. "We got requirements and would build [the applications], and nobody was happy at the end," says Farm Credit Services CIO Dave Martin. One particular project, which was a migration from a mainframe-based customer application-processing system to a Web-based version called PinPoint, involved more than 200 pages of requirements and, by the end of 2004, had taken nearly three years to complete. In the interim, the requirements and business needs had changed, and most of the members of the original business team were gone. The resulting bug-filled system was shelved not long after its shaky debut.
And that's not unusual. According to the 2006 "State of Agile Development" survey by The Agile Alliance and VersionOne, respondents said only 29 percent of traditional projects were "somewhat successful" or "very successful". (Conversely, respondents said 81 percent of their agile projects achieved that level of success.)
The Standish Group, which famously compiles its Chaos data on software project failures, reported in its 2006 research that just 16 percent of waterfall projects succeeded as opposed to 41 percent of agile projects. Standish Group Chairman Jim Johnson, who has been studying project failures for years, says it "boggles" his mind why companies still resist agile development. "To say that companies or CIOs are reluctant to embrace agile is like saying they wouldn't take aspirin for a headache," he says. "And they're not only not taking the aspirin, they're banging their heads against the wall and wondering why it hurts."
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