Debunk The Myths about Agile Development

Agile is a never ending journey. You can't be Agile when you have stopped continuous improvement. 

As an emerging project philosophy and methodology, Agile leads many fiery debates and drives a lot of interesting brainstorming. What are the myths about agile development and how can you justify them?

·Agile is easy - Agile is just another methodology and can be done in a jiffy. (versus it is a framework and will require mindset change, skill-set change, organizational change and considerable time to turn into embedded change)

·Labeling something "Agile", makes it Agile is for every type project, organization.  

· Agile is a methodology and not a set of values and principles

· Agile means no plan 

· Agile is a silver bullet solution to software engineering problems (There is a silver bullet solution) 

· Agile doesn't need up front design

· Agile doesn't allow documentation

· Agile is an excuse to be a cowboy programmer 

·  Pair programming always results in better code 

· Agile by itself is good enough and software engineering practices and ALM tooling is not important

·  Agile methods do not scale or Agile only works for trivial projects

·   There is no governance in Agile projects 

·   One does not have to change to become agile

·   Agile is Scrum, Not realizing there are many implementations of Agile 

·   You can transform a company into agile by reading a book or attending a 2 day course.
·   By doing daily stand-ups, you are agile
·   Agile is bad, after a novice failed to implement it
·   Agile is running mini-waterfalls
·   Everyone is suitable to work as part of an Agile Team, to work in an Agile environment.
·  Agile frees. Dev teams from any obligations. We should just let them do whatever they want as we should trust and empower them even if they are totally new to Agile.
·  We are Agile (already). We tick all checklist boxes. So we are there and do not need to grow further. We can relax. (versus Agile is a never ending journey. You can't be Agile when you have stopped continuous improvement. Agile can be gamed - "ticking the boxes")
· Agile is the goal. It will solve everything, instantaneously (versus Agile is a means to improve organizational business value output / cost performance, sustainability and competitive advantage, etc.)

Agile is both philosophy and methodology; mindset and framework, the organizations and teams just need to experiment and learn; run and adjust; interact and improve; with the end business goals on mind, to achieve project result with customer satisfaction and value creation.

Posted in: Agile,Lessons from Failures