What Agile is NOT

Agile Will NOT Make People Work Faster

People will work just as slow or fast as before. It is not a miracle drug. Agile DOES ensure people are working on the stuff that matters at that particular moment. Which leads to the next point…

Agile Does NOT Mean You Can Change Your Mind All Day Long and Still Ship on Time

If you change your mind that the product should do X instead of Y, you may have to throw away code. This is a fact of life. Agile DOES encourage making key decisions at the last possible moment so that the cost of change is minimized. Agile (a la retrospectives) exposes why or how the deadline was missed and how costly bad decisions were.

Agile is NOT a Better Way to Manage Down

Yes, there are lots of little tasks now. And yes, they are all prioritized and bite-sized so it’s easier to micromanage, right? But you’ve missed the point. Agile let’s the engineers tell the managers what is going on. Agile IS a way to manage expectations (e.g., “managing up”).

Bonus Non-Issue: “We Need to Focus on How It Will Scale”

I’ve heard this a lot. It doesn’t matter (and if you disagree, then you probably aren’t ready for Agile). Agile is about making stuff that works – right now – so you can see if what you’ve made has any value. If it has value, then you worry about scaling. If it’s garbage, nobody will care how it was architected. Get it to work first; scale second. Getting stuff in the customers’ hands and then making decisions based on the feedback is your top priority. If you aren’t focusing on that, you’re probably on your way to creating your very own crappy product that nobody uses.

Today we learned that “agile” is a loaded word.