02.18.10

Agile Blind Spots, Part 1

Posted in Agile, Iterative Development, Software Development at 5:48 pm by Pablosan

I’m feeling the need to state up front that:

• I am not trying to incite a religious war over the merits of Agile or any given Agile methodology
• I think Agile has been a significant positive force in the IT Industry, driving a focus on continual improvement, quality, incremental delivery and, overall, bringing back a fair amount of science to computer science.

Let me state my assumptions: first, Agile is IT process-centric because it was created by software engineers. The reason the term was coined and the movement birthed is because we in IT were tired of a heavy-weight process that had a track record of setting us up for failure. I am extremely grateful that a group self-organized back in late 2001 to stop the insanity and blaze a trail in a new direction. As is often the case, that which gives us our strength is also our downfall.

My second assumption is that the direction of a project and the details of a process should be driven by providing real value in the real world. I’m sure that some of you are already jumping ahead of me and planning my lynching, because I obviously have missed the point that Agile is all about “Business Value.” Hopefully you’ll give me time to explain. While business value is firmly espoused in principle, I’m not convinced that the concept is well understood and, therefore, misses the mark in execution (this statement is based on direct observation of dozens of teams who are doing their best to follow Agile principles and continually improve). The reason for this is straightforward: Agile is being driven by IT. Our focus is on “working software.” Yes, “working” should include the concept of providing real value in the real world, but does it? How do we know? Are we utilizing objective measurements to show how real customers are using the product in the real world? Or are we satisfied validating this through the tacit approval of a Product Owner?

More importantly, is anyone stopping to ask these questions before we get started? I am continually surprised by how many software projects are given the green light or continue to live without anyone asking the hard questions: how will we justify the significant expense incurred to create and maintain this? How many users will actually use it? Will those who we expect to use this find it valuable? What problems will it solve? What problems will it create? How can we know the answers to these questions before we have a product for someone to use? It strikes me that there are very few products who could get away with making it to production without answering these questions. I think the days of software products getting away with it are numbered.

Let me pose a simple question: how many non-IT business professionals can you list who are making a significant contribution to the Agile movement? How many Product Managers? Product Marketers? Corporate Executives? I know my circle is small, but I can’t think of any. It seems to me that if we were truly engaging “the Business side of the house”  that they would eventually have a significant presence as speakers at conferences, authors of books on Agile and the like. Yet the Agile landscape is still dominated by geeks.

This is not to say that Agile has failed, but I do think Agile can only go so far: it can only solve certain problems in its current state. Agile has performed splendidly, moving us away from a draconian focus on process, but I am not convinced it can take us all the way to where we need to be: focused on providing real value in the real world. IT cannot lead us there. We desperately need someone without our blind spots to show us the way.

Fortunately, many in Agile circles are already wrestling with this issue and I intend to delve deeper into some proposed solutions in my next article.

So what do you think? Am I completely off-base? Are we already there and I’m just late to the game? As always, your comments are welcome!

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