Beware the agile champion

New project? Got a business customer who is passionately into Agile but has never done it for real? Lucky you. But beware! Do they know what it really means? Do they blindly recite all the benefits of Agile with no experience of its reality? Do they think that it is a stick that will finally beat IT into delivering value to them? Agile is good, but as with any process there will always be pain. It is not a panacea for everything that is wrong with traditional software development. It takes time for an IT organisation to transform. Just make sure the business customer know this. Things are unlikely to change overnight. Make sure that expectations are set from the outset, schedule time for retrospectives (with safety controls) to ensure everyone is happy and make sure that channels of communication remain open. But as an agile practitioner you’d do that anyway.

1 Comment

  1. Jeremy Miller · Tuesday, 20 June, 2006

    Especially when the non-developer, Agile newbie responds to every single developer concern with “you can just refactor it later, right?”

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