Agile adoption failure modes

Over the years, Agile methodologies have taken heat when they appear to have failed to deliver expected benefits to an organization.

If our project fails, we must blame the Agile process and our practices in some way for this.

Agile is not a magic stick to save a failing project and bring immediate results. It lets you uncover better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others do it.

As with all development methods, the skill and experience of users determine the degree of success and/or abuse of such activity.

So sometimes we obtain the agility by making up our own variation of this methodology. In this case failure of this project should largely be incumbent upon us for deciding to sacrifice the practices we chose to ignore and the new ones we added.

Some are Agile while just coding hell for leather and following no methodology, just cherry picking a couple of practices here and there, and picking the principles they like.

OBJECTIVE:

“Agile practices don't fail—rather the variations on Agile adoption fail”.

This is sometimes referred to as "Scrumbut(t)".

TAKE AWAY: Audience would learn

1. What NOT to do while following certain practices in agile.
2. There is no term like 99% agile. You are 100% agile or you are not .

Profiles

Nancy Sharma

Nancy Sharma is working as a Java Consultant with Xebia IT Architects.

She has been associated with IT industry and Agile for almost two years now.

She has been privileged in starting her career with Agile methodologies of software development and swears by them.

For her, Agile is all about common sense. She has actively been part of the agile community in the NCR region.

Pallavi Jain

Pallavi Jain, Sr Consultant at Xebia, has a distinguished career spanning more than 7 years as a Consultant and Trainer expertise in JBoss Middleware Platform.

She has extensive international experience covering consulting and training.

Prior to joining Xebia, Pallavi was a Technical Consultant with RedHat India Pvt Ltd. a product & service firm. Before that She was IT Engg in CMC LTD - A TATA Enterprise.