Re: [AM] Article of Interest in CIO Magazine

In a message dated 3/8/2004 2:36:18 AM Pacific Standard Time, 
[email protected] writes:
It is up to the business users to have the vision
of where the system is going and what it must do.  Most of them
don't think like that, so guess what, you end up with failed
projects.  
Hubert: 

This is where I came in, so let me get this lined up properly. 

(1) it is difficult or impossible for the development team (including user 
managers and stakeholders collaborating closely and continuously) to predict the 
future with any degree of certainty regarding the ultimate requirements of 
the system under construction (a given). 

(2) the agile methodologies are primarily concerned with that "expensive 
pause" at the front end of the development process, and therefore less concerned 
with that substantially more expensive post-deployment period (which may not be 
possible anyway). 

(3) much of the overall cost of the system is borne post-deployment, beyond 
the primary scope of the agile methodologies.

(4) the business value that can be achieved through agility might be 
extremely difficult to demonstrate and/or estimate at the front end. 

(5) User  communities have been conditioned to more or less expect disasters 
(as in "The darn thing took too long and cost too much to build, and it didn't 
work the way we expected it to when it was delivered, and they've been fixing 
it for the last X years and it still isn't right!"), so their reluctance to 
engage in a new and unproven development methodology is entirely understandable.

This is essentially a compilation of comments from members of this forum 
regarding this topic over the past few months. I may ave missed a few, but this 
should be close to what I've been reading/hearing. Have I gotten it right so 
far? If so, I'd sure appreciate some guidance from the group regarding where we 
go from here as an industry. I have no doubt that agile methodologies currently 
provide an effective development strategy for many applications, but there 
seems to be no dearth of criticism, even from some who have tried it. (as in, 
"damning with faint praise", in many cases). 

In a lighter vein, perhaps the spread of agile methodologies into the 
mainstream will be analogous to the reports of a young lady who had been married 
three times, but had yet to consummate any of them. Apparently her first husband 
was an old family retainer, a partner in her father's business. He was 
forty-five years her senior, and doted on her. After reciting their vows, as they were 
leaving the church, he collapsed and died of a heart attack. 

After several years of grieving, she again ventured out and made the 
acquaintance of the son of a business acquaintance, a sharp young lad of Italian 
descent, given to a life of leisure, the scion of an well-known and affluent local 
family. On the day of their wedding, after reciting their vows, he was killed 
in a hail of gunfire on the church steps, the result of a Mafia "Turf War" 
between his father and the head of another family.

Again, after a suitable period, she found herself a stalwart young man, with 
a flourishing career in the sale of large-scale mainframe computer systems. 
The company he worked for was IBM, and all he wanted to do was tell her how 
great things would be when it finally got there.

My apologies to the faint of heart, no offense intended. I'm sure that there 
are many of you who fully and completely understand the object of this story.

Regards,

Pete   

For more information about AM, visit the Agile Modeling Home Page at www.agilemodeling.com
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