Naresh Jain » Agile FAQs Blog » Managed Chaos » The Mystry of Bloated Agile Process

The Mystry of Bloated Agile Process

Have you noticed Agile is slowly and surely bloating. More and more practices, checks and bounds are added to projects in the name of Agile. Lots of books on a variety of topics (in some cases completely unrelated) is coming out under the Agile brand-name.

Instead of focusing on what more we can add to Agile, why is majority of the community not think about what is not adding value and removing it out of Agile? Why are we not thinking about:

How can we put our Agile process on a Diet?

For example I think Estimation is a wasteful activity, we should throw it out. So are iterations, fixed time releases and many more things that might have made sense a decade ago when some of these methods were evangelized. Using Agile values and principles for so long now, I think we have a better perspective about its future direction.

Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 3rd, 2009 at 2:57 AM and is filed under Agile, Community. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Deborah

I recently came across your blog and have been reading along. I thought I would leave my first comment. I don’t know what to say except that I have enjoyed reading. Nice blog. I will keep visiting this blog very often.

Deborah
Deborah

I recently came across your blog and have been reading along. I thought I would leave my first comment. I don’t know what to say except that I have enjoyed reading. Nice blog. I will keep visiting this blog very often.

Deborah
http://www.methodsansmadness.com/ Jeremy Kriegel

I think there is some validity to your general point. However, one of the powerful aspects of agile, from my perspective, is its flexibility to adapt to the needs of the current situation. If you had a team and stakeholders fully versed and bought into the ‘ideal’ process, you could probably trim quite a bit. As I’m sure this is rarely the case, these extras are added to help move people through the process with greater comfort and familiarity.

You could argue that these extra steps are waste, but perhaps without them, the bottlenecks created would be greater. I think the question to keep asking is, “Are we better than we were before?” We may be a long way from ‘best’ or ‘ideal’, but as long as we are moving ourselves, our teams, and our stakeholders in the right direction, then I think the extras can be justified. Hopefully, the farther along the path we go, the more fat we are comfortable trimming.
http://www.methodsansmadness.com Jeremy Kriegel

I think there is some validity to your general point. However, one of the powerful aspects of agile, from my perspective, is its flexibility to adapt to the needs of the current situation. If you had a team and stakeholders fully versed and bought into the ‘ideal’ process, you could probably trim quite a bit. As I’m sure this is rarely the case, these extras are added to help move people through the process with greater comfort and familiarity.

You could argue that these extra steps are waste, but perhaps without them, the bottlenecks created would be greater. I think the question to keep asking is, “Are we better than we were before?” We may be a long way from ‘best’ or ‘ideal’, but as long as we are moving ourselves, our teams, and our stakeholders in the right direction, then I think the extras can be justified. Hopefully, the farther along the path we go, the more fat we are comfortable trimming.