Part 3:
Threats to Agile
Coming this spring, Better Software magazine will publish an
interview with Ken Schwaber that I conducted.
As part of my blog, I will publish a number of excerpts. Here is part 3 of 5. Enjoy.
KS - I think the biggest threat to agile adoption is people’s desire for certainty and their
belief that somehow, if they can nail things down just a little better, they
will have certainty. You see that with
SAFe and D.A.D. and even Kanban, which has more certainty than Scrum. Even within Scrum there are conversations
about how to get more predictability with velocity, more precision in sprint
planning and trying to be more certain of what we are going to deliver at the
end of the sprint. All that is absolute
contrary from the biggest idea in Scrum: let’s use short cycles so we don’t care about how much we create because we are going to find out
very soon. Middle management wants
predictability so they still haven’t
gotten on board because we haven’t
clarified their role.
I heard a year ago at an ALM conference that one guy was giving a
talk saying agile was a fad. He was talking about what the next biggest fad
would be. That scared me because I think the basic thinking in Scum is to use
empiricism to manage complexity. If they
view this thinking as a fad then it can swing back to “let’s try to control this” and that’s a danger.
Over the last 3 years I’ve seen everyone is coming up with a new
way to make money off of agile and its not really thought through but just an
application of old thinking to the agile movement. They stand a good chance of crushing agile;
of turning agile into a nice set of ideas that are honored in word but not in
principal.
