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Managed Chaos
Naresh Jain's Random Thoughts on Software Development and Adventure Sports
     
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Agile is Counter Intuitive

I hear many people claim Agile is just common sense. When I hear that, I feel, these guys are way smarter than me or they don’t really understand Agile or they are plain lying.

When I first read about test-first programming, I fell off the chair laughing, I thought it was some kind of a joke. “How the heck can I write automated tests, even without knowing what my code would look like”. You think TDD is common sense?

From traditional methods, when I first moved to monthly iterations/sprints, we were struggling to finish what we signed up for in a month. Its but natural to consider extending the time. Also you realize half day of planning is not sufficient, there are lot of changes that come mid-sprint. The logical way to address this problem is to extend the iteration/sprint duration, add more people and to spend more time planning to make sure you’ve considered all scenarios. But to nobody’s surprise but your’s spending more time does not help (in fact makes things worse). In the moments of desperation, you propose to reduce the sprint duration to half, may be even 1/4. Surprisingly this works way better. Logical right?

And what did you think of Pair Programming? Its obvious right, that 2 developers working together on the same machine will produce better quality software faster?

What about continuous integration? Integrating once a week/month is such a nightmare, that you want us to go through that many times a day? But of course its common sense that it would be better.

How about showing working software demos weekly/monthly somehow magically improving collaboration and trust. Intuitive? And also shipping small increments of software frequently to avoid rework and get fast feedback?

One after another we can list each practice (esp.the most powerful ones) and you’ll see why Agile is counter-intuitive (at least to me in early 2000 when I stumbled upon it).


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