The Trouble with Agile
The ceremonies of software development are deeply ingrained in IT. With traditional waterfall processes, the business throws its requirements over the wall to developers who hole up and start coding as they see fit. An 18-month target date can seem like decades away. Lost afternoons are no big deal. Who cares what the "lusers" (coders' derogatory term for users) really want?
"A lot of people on the IT side thought [agile] was the flavour of the month," Martin recalls. "Some just said: 'I'm not going to do it.'" (Those programmers, Martin says, have been churned in agile's wake.)
Opposition to agile methods also can come from enterprise architects, project managers and quality assurance staffers, says Carey Schwaber, a senior analyst for application development at Forrester Research. Enterprise architects worry that there's not enough up-front design with agile, and the consequence is spaghetti code. Agile teams are self-managing, and the project leader's role shifts dramatically — from ordering around to facilitating. And since QA testing happens throughout the process, and not just at the end, there's usually resistance from the testing folk.
Misapprehensions about agile still run rampant in IT organizations. Eugene Nizker, a former financial services CIO and current consultant, ticks off the most infamous ones: Agile teams do not plan. Agile teams skip design. Agile teams do not test. Agile means no documentation.
In addition, executives can feel left out of the daily scrums and sprints of agile life, engendering insecurity at top levels. All this has hindered agile's acceptance, says John Scumniotales, one of the creators of Scrum. "It's easy to talk about the value of building software this way, but if I'm betting my enterprise on this project, senior management needs some controls and visibility into the process," he says, citing the need for an agile-specific tool that functions like a Gantt chart, which visually illustrates project progress. "That's where we need to get to," he says.
But given the epic floods of waterfall failures, CIOs owe it to themselves and their organizations to get agile. "The world just doesn't hold still and wait for 18 months any more," Fifth Third Bancorp's Dury says.
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