The reason why Agile development fails.

7    20 Oct 2016 21:59 by u/roznak

The reason why Agile development fails.

  • Your hard deadline becomes more important than your quality. You release projects that contains known bugs.
  • Because hard deadlines follow in rapid succession your team gets scared to fix any known bugs. 90% of your time and resources gets wasted in creating hacks around that bug instead of fixing it.
  • Bugs are not fixed but postponed to next release. Of course bugs are piling up.
  • Meetings that could have been used to develop code.
  • It kills innovation. Because of the rapid deadlines, there is no more time left to explore alternative solutions. Good developers never have instant solutions but have been toying with ideas up to 2 years in advance. Good solutions that come out of now where has this maturing process.

17 comments

10 u/ilikeskittles 20 Oct 2016 22:06

I'm old school IT, 35 years. I had to look up Agile. Regardless of what process you follow I would add the following that I've discovered over the years. I also think this applies to any industry or profession. 80% of the work product is produced by 20% of the people. The 80% are largely dead weight and get in the way of productive work and cause problems. One of the reasons I think Apple was so successful for as long as they were is that the 80% were regularly culled from the work force.

5 u/roznak [OP] 20 Oct 2016 22:12

80% of the work product is produced by 20% of the people.

That fits my observation. I have noticed that when Agile fails they add more people, but then it fails even harder. These managers now start to panic and try to control the project even harder, but kills off any good developer.

2 u/ilikeskittles 20 Oct 2016 23:16

Yep, every time.

0 u/doompie 21 Oct 2016 05:16

How do I know if  make sure that I'm in the 20%?

8 u/tame 21 Oct 2016 01:31

The #1 reason why Agile fails:

  • As always with the software engineering methodology du jour, it's seen by non-technical management as a silver bullet that lets you build software with unskilled staff, so they hire cheap, submissive developers.

Seriously, I've been in Agile teams and it freaking rocked. I've been in other Agile teams and it sucked donkey bollocks. It all comes down to the people in the team.

0 u/SlappyHo 21 Oct 2016 17:08

100%

At my company we have 3 types of developers. Leaders, Architects, & Developers. Everyone starts as a Developer and you hope they can progress to Architect at the very least. Some come with leadership skills at entry level, but those are rare. Leadership skills can be cultivated by the environment of the company which starts with good mentoring.

6 u/curomo 20 Oct 2016 22:51

There are many scenarios where agile fails; this one is only true if your product owner is incompetent. Plenty of agile teams reserve sufficient capacity to manage defects.

I think the bugs scenario is particularly likely to occur in large organizations where the developers are abstracted too far away from their customers.

5 u/GrumpyEconomist 21 Oct 2016 11:04

Every failure of Agile I have experience happened because someone high enough up the chain of command, kept a spreadsheet with all deliverables and deadlines for when they are supposed to be done. In other words Agile fails because development organisations fail to commit to the methodology, and try to keep a waterfall approach in management while letting the project participants to be "Agile".

-1 u/roznak [OP] 21 Oct 2016 11:34

I heard someone else that said the same thing.

1 u/SwiftLion 21 Oct 2016 00:30

You, sir, are doing agile wrong.

1 u/SlappyHo 21 Oct 2016 17:04

This is wrong. This is the opinion of either a good developer who has been working with low quality developers, or a good developer who has been working under poor quality leadership and mentoring. I run a software department and recently transitioned from Waterfall to Agile. It took us 3 years to fully get to test driven as well. The quality of your developers and the quality of their mentoring are what determine the quality of the software you produce under Agile.

1 u/7even6ix2wo 21 Oct 2016 18:53

I thought Agile fails because it's designed to fail to ensure more billable hours for software engineers.

0 u/cavehobbit 21 Oct 2016 10:40

Agile is good for projects that by their nature contain many small objects that can be developed, debugged or even completely rewritten in short time frames. Web page and web site development can be examples.

Waterfall is better suited to projects where there are many large components that need to interface with other large systems, or projects with complex regulatory compliance needs, or complicated business rules. These projects often sit behind waterfall projects, such as data stores, OLTP databases, HR systems, etc.

The problem is that Agile has become the new hot answer to all that ails development, so it is being used where it is inappropriate. It's like trying to use a hot new Tesla for your mass transit route because it is the cool new thing , when you really still need a bus.