How Risky Is Agile?
I've heard from managers and developers all over the country that they're afraid to try Agile because they can't handle the risk that an Agile project brings. This type of attitude is a complete misunderstanding of Agile, but it's very simply addressed.
Here's a simple example. You've got five teams and a two year project. At what point, using Waterfall, do you realize which teams are in trouble? You don't know. You might catch it early, or you might get the disastrous "Can Do!" attitude from a manager or team lead who's sure their team will catch up, so they tell you they're doing great. But you're depending on status reports from someone who's got a strong vested interest in appearing to succeed. Their bonuses and raises depend on that perception. By the time we realize there's a problem, it's often too late to recover and get the project back on track, so our projects either fail or ships disastrously late.
On the other hand, what about an Agile project? Let's assume four week iterations. (Iterations vary from one week to six weeks. There are other Agile techniques, like continuous integration and test automation that make this possible.) So every four weeks each team has a smaller set of deliverables. This forces your teams to tackle smaller units of work, resulting in smaller, more manageable time estimates. (We all know that smaller estimates are more accurate.) Instead of trying to estimate six months worth of work, they tackle four weeks worth. It's easier to understand the problem and potential pitfalls of a smaller task.
So you're focusing on smaller amounts of work that you can more easily understand. You'll catch more problems because you're forcing the teams to think through the problems at a more granular level.
But when do you catch off track projects? At the end of the iterations... every four weeks. Say at the end of the first iteration, four teams meet their commitments, and the fifth team only finishes 10% of their tasks. Maybe that team just had a slow start, so we overlook their failure to deliver in iteration one.
But in the second iteration, the same team fails to deliver. Then again in the third iteration. Are you seeing a trend? How long do let a failing team continue to fail? In the waterfall world, you depend on regular status reports, not incremental deliverables. But a status report can easily be falsified, or just be overly optimistic. And there's also the well-known tendency of status reports to green shift as they bubble up through the management chain. But how do you green shift a failure to deliver? Especially if you use a product like 6th Sense that reports on completion rates automatically. There's no whitewashing a chart you don't get to edit.
If a team has problems delivering product, there can be an incredible variety of reasons. Bad requirements, new technology, developer incompetence.... who knows what the exact problem is? We don't... but once you realize the problem exists, you can get involved with the team and try to understand and fix it. That's a manager's job. Find problems and fix them. The first step is discovering the problems exist, and this is a time boxed iteration methodology shines.
Agile gives you this understanding in just a few iterations. Waterfall gives you this much later in the product cycle. Sometimes months or years into a large project.
So tell me again... which is the riskier development methodology?
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