Agile vs. Big Picture – How Do You Reconcile?
I had written about three different things to get started and out of the way when starting a project – things developers and consider in bringing a project online. Good feedback and questions though – and I’ve had questions on the site and in email about how this all fits in with Agile development processes.
First, here’s the editorial that kicked it off…
First, a developer (who shall remain nameless) wrote in to say "I don’t really have time to beeing with the stakeholders and managers and others that ask us to do the work. I really need to rely on the cycles and sprints in the dev process to get the iterations of requirements down."
Honestly, this made me cringe. I think this is just asking for the never-ending project, for scope creep and for problems in general in hitting the overall target. I hope this isn’t reality. I think requestors have a responsibility too to learn the process of asking for what they actually want in a way that’s consistent with delivering it.
Second, Swoozie wrote in to say "Speaking to the right people when gathering and identifying the requirements. I can not believe how many "MANAGERS" want to "OWN" this process and the actual end users aren’t even participating. This causes bad design and makes the developers look bad."
Last, but not least Johan writes "How do you think these "two things to consider" hold up when your developers are using agile development methods such as scrum? Developers nowadays are guided to look no further than their sprint interval and get into a flow to score as much points as efficiently possible. Of course they want to add "insert record" and "modify record" functionality in their programs during their sprint. Record life time and deletion, table and database sizing seems not to be of interest any more. Just add a CPU, more RAM and more disk space to their Virtual Machine and everything runs again."
So, what do you think? Is Agile as a methodology counter to getting the bigger picture of a project? Shoot me a note at swynk@sswug.org or comment below…