Oct
16
Putting on my PM hat…
October 16, 2005 |
If I were managing a project, instead of looking at the business needs, would I use Agile methods?
Yes. Yes, I would.
It’s something I want to stress, because I’ve been heavily critical of those approaches here. I believe that they in fact do lead to more rapid development of code and higher productivity on the project team. I believe that a team that is capable of making effective decisions about what to build and how will see a working application much faster this way than they will doing anything else. Agile development does a better job than any other methodology I’ve seen of solving the problems of the project manager and the developer.
The problem with it is that those problems are not the most important ones. The developers get both short-term and long-term benefits and so Agile will have a lot of traction in the development world. However, for the customers, there is little or no short-term gain in most cases (see yesterday’s post on ab initio development for the main exception). Agile methods are harder on the customer and require them to have faith that benefits will eventually emerge. And we all know that humans are bad at trading short-term pain for long-term gain.
Comments
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