We all knew it
The few times I’ve been on an agile project it amounted to start writing without understanding what product we’re building.
That’s because they forgot the meaning of the word agility and want to apply the rules what ever the cost
And also because it’s a comfortable cover up for any kind of money saving stupidity. We don’t need proper requirements engineering, we’re agile. We don’t need an operations team we’re doing an agile DevOps approach. We don’t need frontend Devs, we’re an agile team you all need to be full stack. I have often seen agility as an excuse to push more works towards the devs who aren’t trained to do any of those tasks.
Also common problem is that still tons of people believe agile means unplanned. This definitely also contributes to projects failing that are just agile by name.
100% my experience.
Especially the last part. Writing a single word into a jira ticket doesn’t make it a story, epic or sub task. You’re too lazy to specify, that’s not what agile is meant to be.
I don’t know how many times I have been waiting for the product manager to get out of their meeting so they can help me clarify what they really mean with their “high priority” ticket only consisting a vague title.
“Looks like I’m home early, bye”
A lot of places seem to view it as “we just work from the backlog” with no requirements on when features are delivered, or their impacts on other parts of the project.
You still need a plan, goals and a timeline. Not just a bucket of stuff to get done.
As someone who practices agile software development I find this baffling. I’ve never started a new project without at least 3 weeks worth of research and requirements gathering (and obviously more as the project rolls on). There are seriously companies out there who are like, “Mmm, I feel like this is gonna be an Electron project. Let’s just lay the groundwork and we’ll flesh out the nitty gritty in a week or so.” 😱
Does that surprise me? Not at all. “Agile” was never about making programming better. It was a management buzzword from the start.
We once had a manager who came to me with the serious idea “to make the development process agile”. He had heard of this in a discussion with managers from other companies. The problem? I’m the only person in this department. I program everything alone. How the F should I turn my processes “agile”?
Work for two weeks, take two weeks off to think for a bit, work for two weeks. Rinse and repeat. That’s what agile is, right?
I think he wanted it more like Product Owner, Scrum Master, Architect, Stakeholder, New product development, Tester, Integrator, Team member, Agile architect, Agile Coach, Developer, Team lead, Technical expert, Product Designer, Business Analyst, Programmer, and Specialist for at least eight hours a day in each role…
I think I would also need to see the point at which agile projects are scrapped vs waterfall and how much money is sunk into them by time of scrapping.
My company knows agile will fail more often but also that they fail earlier. So they take on more projects and those seemed to be a bit riskier compared to what they would take on if it were to go by waterfall process.
I am not an agile acolyte, but failure % alone is not convincing. “Fail early, fail often” is a common mantra for a reason.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Even though the research commissioned by consultancy Engprax could be seen as a thinly veiled plug for Impact Engineering methodology, it feeds into the suspicion that the Agile Manifesto might not be all it’s cracked up to be.
One standout statistic was that projects with clear requirements documented before development started were 97 percent more likely to succeed.
“Our research has shown that what matters when it comes to delivering high-quality software on time and within budget is a robust requirements engineering process and having the psychological safety to discuss and solve problems when they emerge, whilst taking steps to prevent developer burnout.”
A neverending stream of patches indicates that quality might not be what it once was, and code turning up in an unfinished or ill-considered state have all been attributed to Agile practices.
One Agile developer criticized the daily stand-up element, describing it to The Register as “a feast of regurgitation.”
In highlighting the need to understand the requirements before development begins, the research charts a path between Agile purists and Waterfall advocates.
The original article contains 502 words, the summary contains 175 words. Saved 65%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
One standout statistic was that projects with clear requirements documented before development started were 97 percent more likely to succeed.
I’d like to work in that company.
Try medical software and devices. The requirements and specs are mandatory before doing anything. It’s actually very fun and I have less burnout thanks to this.
I couldn’t disagree more.
In medical I would end up being apart of endless retirement gathering meetings, then draft up the SOW doc only to have stakeholders change requirements when they were reviewing the doc. Then months later once the doc was finally finished and I could do the development, when UAT time finally came, they’d say the build wasn’t what they wanted (though it matched the written requirements).
Most of the projects I saw executed in the last 4 years either got scrapped altogether or got bogged down in political bs for months trying to get the requirements “just right”.
It was a nightmare. You could blame me, or the company, or bad processes all you want, but I’ve never had fun on a waterfall project, especially not in medical. (Though, in my opinion, we are severely understaffed and need like 4 more BAs.)
It’s almost like the methodology is less important than the people.
Do you think the problem is that the person driving the requirements doesn’t know what they actually want?
I think a good BA is critical to the process because lots of end users have no idea how to put their ideas onto paper.
I also think an MVP helps a lot because people can see and touch it which helps focus their needs.
I would say yes, the problem is stakeholders not having thought critically about what they really wanted from the project.
The motivation for projects were usually “regulatory told us we need to have this new metric for federal reporting”, or “so-and-so’s company can do this, why can’t ours” rather than, “we’d like to increase retention by 6% and here’s the approach we’ve researched to make that happen”.
I ended up experiencing that people in the highest positions weren’t experts in their field, but just people who had a strong intuition. This meant they would zero-in on what they wanted by trial and error rather than logic. Likewise, it meant they were socially adept enough so their higher-ups would never get mad at them when we finished “late and over budget”. People lower on the totem received that blame.
I think humans are just really bad at estimating and keeping their commitments, which is why I enjoy working with agile more. It’s a forgiving framework (imo).
No thanks. It’s way more fun to be part of the decision process. If a manager can anticipate all of the requirements and quirks of the project before it even starts, it’s probably going to be a really boring, vanilla project at which point it’s probably just better to but the software.ä somewhere else.
Creating something new is an art in itself. Why would you not want to be a part of that?
Also: Isn’t it cheating to compare the two approaches when one of them is defined as having all the planning “outside” of the project scope? I would bet that the statistics in this report disregard ll those projects that died in the planning phase, leaving only the almost completed, easy project to succeed at a high rate.
It would be interesting to also compare the time/resources spent before each project died. My hunch is that for failed agile project, less total investment has been made before killing it off, as compared to front loading all of that project planning before the decision is made not to continue.
Complementary to this, I also think that Agile can have a tendency to keep alive projects that should have failed on the planning stage. “We do things not because they are easy, but we thought they would be easy”. Underestimating happens for all project but for Agile, there should be a higher tendency to keep going because “we’re almost done”, forever.
An Agile Project eh. Like an Agile Waterfall process? cool. Cool cool cool.
I know PMI has an Agile thing but by and large Agile can’t be “projects” and vice versa.
what matters when it comes to delivering high-quality software on time and within budget is a robust requirements engineering process and having the psychological safety to discuss and solve problems when they emerge, whilst taking steps to prevent developer burnout.
I haven’t read the book they’re advertising here, but I’ve found these challenges to be socially created, not caused by agile.
Oh, so Agile is only done by autonomous AI?
In the article, they’re proposing a solution to agile (“Impact Development” or something). The quote I listed above is talking about how Impact Development is supposed to provide those things. That said, I don’t blame agile for projects not having those things, it’s the people’s fault. So changing methodologies likely won’t help.
In short: yes, make AI do all project management :P
If you know exactly what you need, then specs are great. Proven solutions for known problems are awesome. Agile is pointless in that circumstance.
But I can count on one hand the number of times stakeholders, or clients, actually know what they want ahead of time and accept what was built to spec with no amends.
When there is any uncertainty, changing a spec under waterfall is significantly worse. Contract negotiation in fixed price is a fucking nightmare of the client insisting the sky is red when the signed off spec states it’s to be green.
… I cannot count the number of times at my different workplaces where we had an agile process, dailies and everything else of the agile BS for projects which where either trivial or not solvable. No worries, the managers, product owners and agile coaches made money and felt good, we developers went for greener pastures… Agile is a scam, nothing they do is based on any facts and when you challenge agile coaches / other people which profit it is always ‘I believe’ or 'proven by anecdote. Combine this with the low quality of people in the average software projects and you have a receipt for failure. Writing the requirements first at least forces people to think trough a project (even if only superficial), so I am not surprised the success rates for this projects goes up.
Agile has its uses, but like everything you need a bit of both. You need a bit of both waterfall and agile.
Example : you need to have your requirements before development, yes. But how far do you go in your requirements? If i were to make all the requirements for my current project ill still be busy in 3 years and will have to redo bits due to law and workflows changing. however , we need requirements to start development. We need to know what we need to make and what general direction it will be heading to a make correct software/code design.Agile also teaches you about feedback loops, which even with waterfall, you need to have to know that what youre developing is still up to spec with what the product owner is expecting. So even with waterfall, deliver features in parts or sit together at least once every x weeks to see if youre still good with the code/look/design.
Pure agile is bullshit, but so is pure waterfall. Anything that isnt a mix is bullshit and in the end, it all depends on the project, the team and the time/money constraints.
Exactly!
I worked at one Agile place they had all their sprints and milestones in a Gantt Chart waterfall. They also did big design up front and a lot of process. They had do all kind agile and scrum training, but it was the most process heavy place I worked.
Im currently trying to steer a product team to have this kind of process. They are working with an ancient piece of software that is slowly being replaced. However, we need to replace piece by piece while the main app is still being maintained because of law and workflow changes. This is why i want them to set the requirements and designs up front a bit so we can make a good analysis of it before development starts so no technical difficulties or questions arise mid development! However, nothing is set in stone and after each small piece ( aka after each sprint ) we have our review and product owners and stakeholders see what we have made and can chime in, causing us sometimes to pivot what we were making.
Best of both worlds!Rewrites are great. You have a specification that is so defined it is literally code.
When it’s blue sky, it’s harder. Plans will be wrong. The users don’t understand really what they need or want. It all ends up evolving. Anything with a GUI is worse because users/customers need (want) things moved about, re-themed, with no regard to what’s below. Best to nail them to mock up designs they signed off on. Same with API interfaces. If they signed off on the design, you can then point out “spec change” and get more time/money. It’s more about ass covering than using the outcome or process.
Agreed. Depending in what branch or situation youre in you need handle appropriately and cover your arse but also make it work. If i was to work on a timed project, and the project is set to not make the deadline due to spec changes i will report that ahead of tine to cover the teams arses, but at least we can pivot and deliver something that will be useful and up to spec depending on the feedback :)
I don’t think there is a way that always works.
It’s not always possible to get a clear spec and do big design up front in R&D. The whole point can be to work out what can be done and how.
Good points, and I mostly agree with you, especially with feedback loops!
Still, I never argued for waterfall. This is a false dichotomy which - again - comes from the agile BS crowd. The waterfall UML diagram upfront, model driven and other attempts of the 90s/early 20s were and are BS, which was obvious for most of us developers, even back then.
Very obviously requirements can change because of various reasons, things sometimes have to be tried out etc. I keep my point, that there has to exist requirements and a plan first, so one can actually find meaningful feedback loops, incorporate feedback meaningfully and understand what needs to be adapted/changed and what ripple effects some changes will have.
Call it an iterative process with a focus on understanding/learning. I refuse to call this in any way agile. :-P
A more proper title would be “study finds 268% higher failure rates for poorly planned software projects”.
“Agile” as a word is mostly an excuse of poor planners for their poor planning skills.
An even better title would be “‘Study’ by firm pushing new technique finds old technique is bad.”
Agreed. The problem is people mistake “zero planning and structure” to mean “agile”. Of course it fails.
Agile to me was always mini waterfall. You always know who’s doing what, why, and what success looks like on a 2 week sprint horizon. When you see people on a sprint without a clear understanding of what they are doing over the next couple of weeks - then you know your project is in trouble for sure.
Wtf is Agile ? I can’t get my head around that.
Pbpbpbp…agile fails fast by design.
The counter from the article is you need a specification first, and if you reveal the system wasn’t going to work during requirements gathering and architecture, then it didn’t count as a failure.
However, in my experience, architects are vastly over priced resources and specifications cost you almost as much as the rest of the project due to it.
TLDR…it’s a shit article that confuses fail fast with failure.
Fail fast is the whole point and the beauty of agile. Better to meet with clients early and understand if a project is even workable rather than dedicating a bunch of resources to it up front and then finding out six months in (once the sunk cost fallacy has become too powerful)
Thanks for pointing that out so I didn’t have to.
What’s the alternative? Waterfail?
Yeah because business requirements and technology is changing at an ever slower rate…
Personally, I was never great with agile projects. I get that it’s good for most and sort of used it when I was a CTO but as a solo developer, there are days when I’d rather eat a bowl of hair than write code and then some days, I’ll work all night because I got inspired to finish a whole feature.
I realize I’m probably an exception that maybe proves the rule but I loathed daily stand-ups. Most people probably need the structure. I was more of a “Give me a goal and a deadline and leave me alone, especially at 9am.” person. (Relatedly, I was also a terrible high school student and amazing at college. Give me a book and a paper to write and you’ll have your paper. If you have daily bullshit and participation points, I’ll do enough to pass but no more.)
It’s very likely that as a sole developer you are actually practicing agile as it’s intended and not corporate “agile”.
There isn’t a problem with agile there’s a problem with it being mislabeled and misused as a corporate & marketing tool for things that have nothing to do with agile.
