Is Agile For Everyone?
Currently I am working at a company with a fast-paced environment, very aggressive deadlines, and historically a high rate of failure in the form of poor product quality and missed deadlines. Back when I started at the company, I introduced them to Agile methodologies and how they could benefit the organization in higher employee and stake-holder satisfaction, fewer or no missed deadlines, and better product quality. After some initial mixed reactions I was able to get them on board with the idea — or so I thought!
While I have been successful in implementing many of the Agile practices such as earlier stakeholder involvement, EDUF, iterative development, code refactoring, unit testing, continuous integration, etc. in a relatively short amount of time, I still have to deal with the fact on a daily basis that they have to have very good estimates too far in the future. They must have this information from a budgetary standpoint and in order to be able to make executive decisions in advance about whether or not to proceed with a given project.
I have tried my best to explain how the Agile estimation works, and how trying to estimate too far in the future could be a wasted effort, but after all the time and energy spent, I am beginning to think that perhaps the Agile philosophy is not for all mindsets after all!
