April 2010
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CONTENTS
How Agile Becomes Fragile - Jeffery Payne
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How Agile Becomes Fragile
-Jeffery Payne
I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve heard someone say: “Oh, we tried agile and it didn’t work.” If every conversation I’ve had with people stopped at this point, one might conclude that agile only works when the stars and moon align. In my experience, nothing could be farther from the truth. Agile becomes fragile when one or more of the following situations occur:
Engineering cuts corners. Agile isn’t an all-or-nothing proposition, but there are fundamental practices and disciplines that, if not followed, will result in project failure. Unit testing is one example. If your engineers are not doing proper unit testing, they are not doing agile. Another example is refactoring. If engineering never steps back and thinks about how to improve its software, they are not doing agile. We have a name for software development without adequate documentation, effective testing, or no design: It’s called ad-hoc development, and it is not agile.
Project management doesn’t control scope. Agile turns traditional project management on its head. Instead of fixing project scope and estim