Why Go Agile

In a recent survey by Cutter Consortium, unrealistic deadlines and excessive change introduced into projects were cited as the top two reasons for software envelopment projects’ failures. Let’s look at how the fundamental values of Agile can be mapped precisely to exactly the pain points of most software development organizations.

Project Killers

Poorly conceived project time frames top the reasons why development efforts fail:

35%

“Our senior management pressures the project manager and/or the development team to agree to impossible deadlines, excessive project scope, or a limited budget”

17%

"Our customers or marketing department request too many changes during project development"

Source: Cutter Consortium

1. Unrealistic deadlines and budgets

Agile development addresses the fundamental disconnect between the business and the development organization, which is the reason for missed deadlines and exceeded budgets. It is simply not possible to fix all the variables: time, budget, scope and level of quality. When customer tries to force the first three on the developers, the only variable left is the quality, which deteriorates inevitably, causing the projects to fail.

Agile methodologies deal with the issues of predictability, visibility, and realistic planning through continuous testing and integration and delivering working software early and often. Typically, the Agile approach is to fix time and budget, and to allow the scope to vary in a tightly controlled manner, while adhering to the highest standard of quality as a given. In an Agile situation, the customer has close control over the software development process: at every iteration, they have the opportunity to verify the team’s progress and to change the direction in which the project is going. Through receiving customer feedback after every iteration, Agile teams continuously refine their estimations, as well as their understanding of the requirements, which leads to a much more realistic vision of the project’s timeline and budget for the customer.

2. Cost of change

Traditional development methodologies based on treating design as a separate phase that is completed up front, are by their very nature resistant to change. However, for the majority of software projects today, predicting and planning everything upfront is simply not realistic. The business environments change so quickly today that project requirements are becoming obsolete almost as soon as they are written. In order for companies to stay ahead of the curve, they need to be highly adaptive, and so do their software assets.

Agile processes provide companies with powerful tools to keep the cost of change relatively low. Agile uses a style of planning where long term plans are very fluid and high-level, and the only stable plans are short term plans that are made for a single iteration. This keeps the cost of change from growing exponentially with the progress of a project, and essentially increases ROI on the development effort.

What introducing Agile processes and practices can do for your organization:

• Increase return on investment by focusing on providing a continuous flow of value to the customer
• Deliver reliable results by engaging customers in frequent interactions and shared ownership of projects
• Manage uncertainty, increase visibility, and drive down the cost of change through iterative development, frequent delivery of working software, anticipation and adaptation
• Unleash creativity and innovation by recognizing that individuals are the ultimate source of value, and creating an environment where they can make a difference
• Boost performance through group accountability for results and shared responsibility for team effectiveness
• Improve effectiveness and reliability through situationally specific strategies, processes and practices