I’m a big believer in incremental development using agile methodologies.  The results are a better product with fewer surprises.  But lately I’ve seen some cases where folks have become zealots for specific agile methodologies, like scrum.  But in my experience, that simply doesn’t work.  Every methodology has its strengths and weaknesses, so there are going to be cases where some adaptations are going to have to be made.

Let’s take scrum as an example.  In a complex environment where there are several development teams, it can be really difficult to manage dependencies between the teams, especially if some teams are using agile methods and others aren’t.  If one team should miss a dependency milestone, there could be serious consequences for the other teams.  But scrum really has no formal mechanism to deal with dependencies.  A purist might say that the scrum of scrums is the way it should be done, but when only some of the teams are using scrum, that really doesn’t work.

So my advice is to keep the big-picture goals in mind about what the goals are for using agile development, but to adapt as needed.  As long as you don’t go overboard and stifle the agile method with too much process, the agile benefits will still pay off.

This entry was posted on Friday, May 7th, 2010 at 10:37 am and is filed under Software Development . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.