Lose 25% of Developers When Moving To Agile?!
by Kelly Waters
I attended a very interesting web meeting today about SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) and Agile Development with the Burton Group - a consultancy specialising in Enterprise Architecture.
They explained all the advantages of SOA and Agile Development and why they are such cool things to be doing. I asked what the main pitfalls were in their experience and I heard a very interesting comment.
They said that changing Developers' mindset for Agile Development was one of the hardest things to do and a challenge that is often under-estimated. I've certainly seen this challenge first hand, but was very surprised to hear their view.
In their experience, they say you can expect to lose anything up to 25% of your Developers in moving to Agile Development; as it's just not an approach that suits everyone.
I must admit my experience is rather different. Whilst I have found educating Developers and Team Leaders (and Business people) to adapt to a different mindset takes time, actually most seem to embrace the concepts and are excited by the approach.
By contrast, I have found most tension comes with Project Managers, as it's fundamentally different to the methodology they're used to (invariably based on PRINCE2/Waterfall), and even more so Testers who like to have a lot more clarity about what they're testing than Agile Development usually provides.
10 Key Principles of Agile Development
They explained all the advantages of SOA and Agile Development and why they are such cool things to be doing. I asked what the main pitfalls were in their experience and I heard a very interesting comment.
They said that changing Developers' mindset for Agile Development was one of the hardest things to do and a challenge that is often under-estimated. I've certainly seen this challenge first hand, but was very surprised to hear their view.
In their experience, they say you can expect to lose anything up to 25% of your Developers in moving to Agile Development; as it's just not an approach that suits everyone.
I must admit my experience is rather different. Whilst I have found educating Developers and Team Leaders (and Business people) to adapt to a different mindset takes time, actually most seem to embrace the concepts and are excited by the approach.
By contrast, I have found most tension comes with Project Managers, as it's fundamentally different to the methodology they're used to (invariably based on PRINCE2/Waterfall), and even more so Testers who like to have a lot more clarity about what they're testing than Agile Development usually provides.
10 Key Principles of Agile Development
15 March 2007 09:47
The loss of developers occurs because most large enterprises can only do agile for specific pockets and haven't figured out how to make it pervasive nor sustainable. Once you get a taste of agile, you can't ever go back to waterfall..
20 August 2009 12:01
As a developer I would agree with the bit about project managers finding it hard. For me the more I find out about Agile methodologies and try to apply them the more I see the benefits, but as soon as I try to suggest to a project manager that something is a good idea, up comes the brick wall.