The world over, companies are embracing the Agile Revolution. All software engineering is relegated to agile practices. Sounds good, right?
Wrong. Agile is not a one-size fits all solution. It is not even a methodology. Agile is only a set of guidelines. Most companies embracing agile have no appreciation for the pitfals that come with agile. Invariably, many companies will embrace the SCRUM methodology in some form or other. Unfortunately, SCRUM is not really a methodology either. Rather, it is a further set of guidelines and rituals that may be adopted.
There is a dirty little secret about SCRUM and Agile. The only promise that the agile alliance makes is that there is an emphasis on working software. This is a good thing, right? Not exactly.
In practice, SCRUM and Agile are pitched to corporate executives with the promise of greater efficience (read: cost savings). The dirty little secret is that there are virtually no successful agile implementations of Agile methods in the corporate world. Large corporations come replete with a set of challenges that Agile is not equipped to address. Namely, large corporations have the challenge of large amounts of legacy and commercial software products which may be highly customized and integrated into a vast web of complexity. Furthermore, corporate software may have evolved over years, or even decades such that the underlying business rules which prompted the development of various features of the applications are not well understood. These software modules are typically very poorly documented and it is prohibitive to reverse engineer the software, and the time and budget to do this is typically astronomical.
The bottom line, is that the "experts" pitching agile to corporations are selling snake oil. There is literally not one large corporation the world over that can point to any successful agile implementation at corporate scale with the possible exceptions of Amazon and Ali Baba, both are arguably green-field, startups, which is the sweet-spot for agile approaches. When you have no legacy software, no installed base, and no contractual commitments whatsoever, agile can work brilliantly, but established corporations are being blind-sided by agilists who promise the world only to deliver nothing of value.
