- Why Agile Is Controversial: Agilists vs. Hubricists
- How to Make Agile 'Methodology Non Grata'
- The Insipid Results of Scrummerfall
- Summary
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How to Make Agile 'Methodology Non Grata'
In this light, the best way to make Agile fail is to open up just enough transparency to allow an executive sponsor—who is used to getting "All is well" messages from the Hubricist—to see how ugly the sausage factory is. Scrummerfall is very effective in this regard.
Let's think about what happens in a Waterfall project with daily scrum meetings. Without any accountability for delivery of working features, one of the symptoms of a Scrummerfall project is that you have daily scrums that have lots of "I did this, I did that," where the values of "this" and "that" constitute activities, not results. The same old problems exist—notably, working a plan that was written months ago and only gets updated when the change control committee holds its bimonthly meeting. Scrummerfall manages to shine a brighter light on the dysfunctions of waterfall methodology, demonstrating failure to a wider audience.
From here, you start the next phase, which is to assign to Agile (implemented as Scrummerfall) the symptoms that really result from the unstructured flagellations of a low-morale team. Notably, someone will use Agile FUD along the lines of "Agile was invented by developers who don't want to write documentation," ascribing this belief as the reason why the current Agile (Scrummerfall) effort is failing. As things get worse, anything wrong with the project gets assigned to the new buzzword "Agile," and suddenly, Agile means The Reason Everything Is Wrong.