Agile: Some misconceptions
Date: 2008-12-31 09:04:00

I came across an interesting http://visualstudiomagazine.com/columns/article.aspx?editorialsid=2952[article written for Visual Studio Magazine] about agile methodologies where the author makes what I consider to be some misconceptions.

The first is around the level of experience of people working on an agile team:

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For example, agile teams have a tendency to require a high level of experience and professionalism just to join the team.
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I wouldn't say I have a high level of experience and I've been working on agile teams for the past two years, just one data point suggesting that this statement is not actually accurate.

I think it is important to have experienced team members, at the Journeyman or Master level to use the lingo of http://www.mcbreen.ab.ca/SoftwareCraftsmanship/[Software Craftsmanship], but I don't think you'd want your team to be completely filled with these types of people.

This is one of the things that is pointed out in http://www.markhneedham.com/blog/2008/10/06/pragmatic-learning-and-thinking-book-review/[Pragmatic Learning and Thinking] referring to the http://pragmaticstudio.com/dreyfus[Dreyfus Model] definition of expert in this case. We need to have people of differing levels of experience if we are to create a successful team.

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Ideally you want a mix of skills on a team: having an all-expert team is fraught with its own difﬁculties; you need some people to worry about the trees while everyone is pondering the forest.
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This is referring to the fact that as people become more competent they tend to start focussing more on the big picture than they did when they just started learning. As the authors point out, it's useful to have some people on the team who just want to focus on the details and get things done.

Of course I'm sure there are examples of 'dream teams' of software developers who have worked successfully together, but maybe this is more the exception than the rule.

The second point the author raises whether agile is just about making developers comfortable by allowing them to write more code:

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Finally, I wonder how much of agile development exists simply to make developers more comfortable. Most developers love to write code, and agile does a pretty good job of rationalizing why developers don't need to do anything else. Design? Code it with test-driven development. Requirements gathering? I've heard proponents of agile development say that the user doesn't know what they want until they see something, so you might as well get straight to coding.
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It is fair to say that when working in an agile way we get to the code more quickly than when following some other approaches but surely that's a good thing?

Although certainly some part of design is best done at the whiteboard, we can't actually know whether our designs are going to work unless we put them in the code so I don't see design by TDD being a problem.

There is a need to do some requirements gathering before we start working on features/stories but quite often we don't find out about constraints and trade offs until we begin implementing a feature, at which time the customer can decide what approach they want us to take. The goal here is to try and provide them quick feedback so that what we develop is actually what they want.

I would encourage the author to go and see an agile team at work (maybe using the Patterns and Practices team at Microsoft as an example) and see whether he believes this points still hold true.