Agile Methodology

Imagine this. You walk into a restaurant, you sit down, you open the menu and what do you see? There are no pictures, ingredients or prices of the dishes. Only some sketches with fancy names such as Quiche Lorraine, Chocolate Lasagna, Mrs. Floyd's Divinity, Fudge Cake, Hoppin' John Soup.

You: “Where is all the information?”

Waiter: “Sir, I’m sorry sir, our restaurant is using Agile methodology, we have a great team of chefs and sous chefs in the kitchen and we are going to make sure you and your guests are going to have the best experience. When order is ready, we will give you an estimate“

Would you like to experience this? This is how currently agile software delivery looks like for most of the companies and there are a lot of challenges to overcome, and my favorite ones are

• Semantics & Transparency

Business and Development experts are talking totally in different languages. Remember Quiche Lorraine from the menu? Good, the business needs to add that to our Restaurant menu, here is a User Story for you. We will name it, mmm… Quiche Lorraine. As a user I would like to be able to order Quiche Lorraine with multiple cheeses and bacon. Acceptance criteria: It should be healthy and tasty. 

I feel sorry for your kitchen staff, but our managers will support you. By the way, you need to finish it during this sprint, and if you need more resources to be able to finish this on time just let them know.  

If Business needs to track the whole entree menu items progress, and Project Managers or Scrum masters don’t provide product roadmap with regular status update and proper task breakdown for the development team, it brings transparency issues, anxiety and sometimes even minor defects may cause serious escalations and trust issues.

Next challenge is

•  MVP scope & Budgeting

In Agile there is no process for product effective budget forecasting and this is very challenging for business representatives, because they have to plan the budget. And this is becoming more challenging knowing how complex requirements are being managed. Imagine you are a builder company and you have to start signing contracts with your customers before the houses are ready. And you can’t effectively overcome such challenges when businesses are struggling with the product's MVP scope definition before the start. Agile gives flexibility for sure, but changing wheels while driving is costly and is inefficient, especially when it becomes part of the culture. 

• Luck of expertise & Cultural barriers

Continuous Integration, Continuous Delivery and Continuous Feedback are not just buzzwords, they are crucial for your organization if you want to have effective software delivery, without DevOps or DevSecOps practices You can’t successfully adopt agile. When software delivery faces multiple decision-making verticals, challenging cross-team collaborations can cause very serious bottlenecks and delivery blockers, delays and questionable solutions.