Cargo Cult Methodology: How Agile Can Go Terribly, Terribly Wrong

Agile development methodologies such as iterative development, pair programming or continuous integration have found their way out of small startups even into big firms. Their promise to better adapt to change fits well to the current reality of always changing businesses, which was also one main argument for employing SOA.

But unfortunately, the change from a waterfall development process to agile methodologies is not as easy as pushing a button. In his article “Cargo Cult Methodology: How Agile Can Go Terribly, Terribly Wrong“, Charlie Martin tells the story of a project that he did some years ago in a company. Disappointed from their past waterfall project, which was not really successful, he and his co-workers decided to drive their next project in an agile way. But mostly due to organizational difficulties, the project failed terribly. Their management wanted a commitment about budget and time up-front, which of course is not easily possible when going agile. So they started collecting all requirements and planned their whole project in a project management tool. Also, their plan to roll out small incremental releases in short cycles failed, because the rollout of these builds required effort in the rest of the organization and this effort had not been scheduled.

In the end, they ended up with an so called agile project which was in fact a waterfall project (with a “let’s pretend” schedule) with different terminologies.

Although being an easy read, the article is particularly interesting, because it shows the pitfalls which lie in establishing agile development in an existing organization. In the second part, the author also presents some counter-measures against the problems he faced in his story.

Link to the article:
Cargo Cult Methodology: How Agile Can Go Terribly, Terribly Wrong, Cio.com