I have myself a problem with the proponents of Agile. Before I state it, I'll need to clarify a few points:
1) I have read the Agile Manifesto and support the values and ideas behind it
2) I have never worked in an Agile environment (or even an iterative development style project)
3) I very much consider myself as a context-driven tester
With these points in mind, let me share my issue.
Through the things I have read from those who do work with and contribute to the Agile methodologies, I get the impression that Agile is always right, and if it doesn't work, it must be how it was implemented (see we tried baseball and it didn't work). Therefore, there cannot be any context where Agile may not be suitable. This sounds suspiciously like best practice to me.
However, I freely admit I may be entirely wrong here. As I say, it is an impression based on various things I have read and from a position of relative ignorance. I would like this impression to be changed and certainly to be less ignorant on the subject.
Links to suitable reading matter would be appreciated.
Hi Andrew,
ReplyDeleteI think agile - particularly scrum because it providers more structure - is an incredible tool for managing projects and developing products.
However, I do think there are cases when it's not suitable e.g. when the requirements are very well defined up-front like in the case of a system upgrade or when the client isn't able to support agile. In these cases I still think you can adopt some of the agile principles but you would abstract away some of the client interfaces and have a more waterfall type delivery.
I wrote a blog post which covers part of this theme if you're interested http://www.boxuk.com/blog/the-challenges-of-project-management and please feel free to comment!
Thanks,
Stuart