The Fragile Manifesto

A lot of what I’ve been reading and thinking about of late is about the agile backlash. More speed, lower velocity reflects on IT teams pursuing “deliver more/newer IT” at the cost of “help the company achieve its mission”. Grooming the Backfog is about one dysfunction that arises as a result: (mis)managing a never-ending road of small changes rather than looking at the big picture and finding a path toward the destination. Our products are not our products attempts to address this problem by recasting teams not as makers of product, but as solvers of problems.

Here’s the latest: UK wasting £37 billion a year on failed agile IT projects. Some people will say that this is a result of not Agiling enough: if you were all Lean and MVP and whatever you’d not get to waste all of that money. I don’t necessarily agree with that: I think there’s actually things to learn by, y’know, reading the article.

The truth is that, despite the hype, Agile development doesn’t always work in practice.

True enough, but not a helpful statement, because “Agile” now means a lot of different things to different people. If we take it to mean the values, principles and practices written by the people who came up with the term, then I can readily believe that it wouldn’t work in practice for people whose context is different from those who came up with the ideas in 2001. Which may well be everyone.

I’m also very confident that it doesn’t mean that. I met a team recently who said they did “Agile”, and discussed their standups and two-week iterations. They also described how they were considering whether to go from an annual to biannual release.

Almost three quarters (73%) of CIOs think Agile IT has now become an industry in its own right while half (50%) say they now think of Agile as “an IT fad”.

The Agile-Industrial Complex is well-documented. You know what isn’t well-documented? Your software.

The report revealed 44% of Agile IT projects that fail, do so because of a failure to produce enough (or any) documentation.

The survey found that 34% of failed Agile projects failed because of a lack of upfront and ongoing planning. Planning is a casualty of today’s interpretation of the Agile Manifesto[…]

68% of CIOs agree that agile teams require more Architects. From defining strategy, to championing technical requirements (such as performance and security) to ensuring development teams stick to the rules of the game, the role of the Architect is sorely missed in the agile space. It must be reintroduced.

A bit near the top of the front page of the manifesto for agile software development is a sentence fragment that says:

Working software over comprehensive documentation

Before we discuss that fragment, I’d just like to quote the end of the sentence. It’s a long way further down the page, so it’s possible that some readers have missed it.

That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more.

Refactor -> Inline Reference:

That is, while there is value in comprehensive documentation, we value working software more.

Refactor -> Extract Statement:

There is value in comprehensive documentation.

Now I want to apply the same set of transforms to another of the sentence fragments:

There is value in following a plan.

Nobody ever said don’t have a plan. You should have a plan. You should be willing to amend the plan. I was recently asked what I’d do if I found that my understanding of the “requirements” of a system differ from the customer’s understanding. It depends a lot on context but if there truly is a “the customer” and they want something that I’m not expecting to offer them, it’s time for me to either throw away my version or find a different customer.

Similarly, nobody said don’t have comprehensive documentation. I have been on a very “by-the-book” Agile team, where a developer team lead gave feedback that they couldn’t work out where a change would go to enable a particular feature. That’s architecture! What they wanted was an architectural plan of the system. Except that they couldn’t explicitly want that, because software architecture is so, ugh, 1990s and Rational Rose. Wanting an architecture diagram is like wanting to use CORBA, urrr.

Once you get past that bizarre emotional response, give me a call.