Should We Sing the Praises of Agile, or Bury It?

'Stakeholders must be included' throughout an agile project 'to ensure the evolving deliverables meet their expectations,' according to an article this week in Communications of the ACM.

But long-time Slashdot reader theodp complains it's a 'gushing how-to-make-Agile-even-better opinion piece.'

Like other pieces by Agile advocates, it's long on accolades for Agile, but short on hard evidence justifying why exactly Agile project management 'has emerged as a critical component for firms looking to improve project delivery speed and flexibility' and the use of Agile approaches is being expanded across other departments beyond software development. Indeed, among the three examples of success offered in the piece to 'highlight the effectiveness of agile methods in navigating complex stakeholder dynamics and achieving project success' is Atlassian's use of agile practices to market and develop its products, many of which are coincidentally designed to support Agile practices and teams (including Jira). How meta.

Citing 'recent studies,' the piece concludes its call for stakeholder engagement by noting that '59% of organizations measure Agile success by customer or user satisfaction.' But that is one of those metrics that can create perverse incentives. Empirical studies of user satisfaction and engagement have been published since the 1970's, and sadly one of the cruel lessons learned from them is that the easiest path to having satisfied users is to avoid working on difficult problems. Keep that in mind when you ponder why difficult user stories seem to languish forever in the Kanban and Scrum Board 'Ice Box' column, while the 'Complete' column is filled with low-hanging fruit. Sometimes success does come easy! So, are you in the Agile-is-Heaven or Agile-is-Hell camp?

Read more of this story at Slashdot.