Saturday, January 2, 2010

Management's perspective of Agile development

What do managers want from Agile?

If you're an executive with your job on the line when it comes to shipping a product on time you want assurances if not guarantees that a quality product will ship on time. Experienced managers who are used to waterfall will want frequent checkpoints, detailed reports, and updates on blocking issues. As Waterfall team members we do our best to plan for the work including contigency plans if things go awry. Guess what... things almost always go awry at some point. The biggest failing of Waterfall is that it often causes surprises at the end for management because our crystal ball is very clouded on all except the most trivial projects.

Let's go back to what managers want; a quality product shipped on time. While Agile doesn't guarantee this it does provide frequent feedback along the way that should remove the typical end of cycle surprises that occur when the project goes off the rails. Holding multiple iterations, using burndowns to measure progress and not incurring technical debt will go a long way towards towards meeting what managers want. We need to give managers a choice to make decisions along the way; not in terms of quality but in terms of resources, release date, and features shipped. These are the four variables in the software development equation.

Managers are about results, as long as we can show results that it works I don't think they care as much about what process we use. In this case works = sustainable, predictable, quality delivery of the product.

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