Beware of 100% Agile

The Agile method of software development took the software world by storm in early 2000s. It has continued to grow significantly in the last two decades. So much has it grown that its predecessor, the waterfall model, is now seen as an outdated Jurassic method of approaching software. Very few companies still stick to the waterfall model. And those companies are considered luddites!

But is the Agile method as good as the hype surrounding it is? Or is it just another management fad that software engineers are tolerating in silence to keep their jobs? Turns out that Agile is superior to waterfall model on several counts. But a 100% move of each and every process in a company from the so-called outdated methods to the nimble Agile methods can do more harm than good. How? Read more to find out.

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6 practices that keep your software masterpiece from seeing the light of day

Software engineers switch between two modes: painful perfectionists and band-aid stickers. During the start of a project, software engineers discuss things to painful detail on whiteboards, Post-It notes, restaurant napkins and even glass doors. This eats away precious time that could have been spent on actual development. But as the deadline looms, the whiteboards and glass doors are rubbed, Post-It notes are torn apart and restaurant napkins are trashed. The plans are chucked in favour of anything that makes the application work.

Often, the released solution has plenty of duct tape code that holds the functionality together. After all the over-planning, duct-tape coding is the only thing possible in the limited time that the programmers leave for themselves. Software teams hardly release anything during the early phase of a software project as everything is put in meticulous detail on paper only. But as the deadline approaches, frenetic releases are made everyday or even every few hours, causing confusion among the developers, project managers, testing teams and the clients.

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Build a pipeline to success with CI/CD

Meet Laura. She’s a popular author and has written 25 books. She’s been writing for 10 years. It takes her about 6 months to roll out a book, from draft to publication. Her books are on an average 150 pages long.

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How agile is your project: Part 2: Scrum and Kanban

In the last post, we saw what Agile methodology is and its manifesto. We saw an example of how Agile can be used by a tailor Bharat to sew a shirt for a customer Aditya. While we talked about Agile through a story, there are formal ways of planning and keeping track of projects using Agile. Two of them are Scrum and Kanban. Continue reading “How agile is your project: Part 2: Scrum and Kanban”

How agile is your project: Part 1

Technology is always riddled with jargon. No sooner have we mastered one jargon term that another twenty head our way. It is just impossible to keep track of all of them. However one jargon has been flying around for too long now and very few people are actually able to make good sense out of it. That jargon term is ‘Agile’. This term is so often used nowadays. Every day you will come upon a company that announces that they have adopted Agile methods. But ask them what they mean and they will not answer in simple English. That is what I want to do in this post. Continue reading “How agile is your project: Part 1”