Question

What are pitfalls for agile development methodologies?

Answer 1

From @George Stocker’s quoted list, with my rebuttals…

• Lack of structure and necessary documentation

  1. Many agile methods are highly prescriptive of essential practices and have structure, though much of it is informal.
  2. Define necessary. Much documentation required by plan-driven methods is not used and/or hopelessly out of date. Agility focuses on producing those deliverables that are actually needed.

• Only works with senior-level developers

  1. Works best with developers who can work independently (or in pairs).
  2. A mix of senior/junior developers works just fine.

• Incorporates insufficient software design

  1. Incremental design with aggressive refactoring can lead to better design because much of the design is done with better understanding of the application.
  2. A valid criticism might be that agile implementers may be afraid to do any design up front for fear of not being ‘agile’ — none of the methodologists would recommend entirely skipping up front design.

• Requires too much cultural change to adopt

  1. Can be valid, but in my opinion it is worth it

• Can lead to more difficult contractual negotiations

  1. Definitely. This should change as more agile successes are achieved.

• Can be very inefficient — if the requirements for one area of code change through various iterations, the same programming may need to be done several times over. Whereas if a plan were there to be followed, a single area of code is expected to be written once.

  1. Only if the plan is rigidly adhered to at the expense of actual desired behavior, otherwise you have the same problem.
  2. If changes do occur, agile methods handle this better than plan-driven methods.

• Impossible to develop realistic estimates of work effort needed to provide a quote, because at the beginning of the project no one knows the entire scope/requirements

  1. Most agile methods give you good tools to understand your velocity.
  2. Planning is hard for all methods. This is not unique to agile methods.
  3. Agile methods, by putting software in the customer’s hands early discover the real requirements faster than rigorous, up-front planning because the customer doesn’t know what he really wants until he sees it.

• Can increase the risk of scope creep due to the lack of detailed requirements documentation

  1. Agile takes a completely different perspective to this. It focuses on scope/time trade-offs rather than limiting scope to keep fixed time.
  2. Customers get to make choices about the scope/time trade-off in Agile, so they are in complete control of scope.

• Agile is feature driven, non-functional quality attributes are hard to be placed as user stories

  1. You can use whatever method you want to track quality attributes, including traditional methods from plan-driven practices if you want.