Note that this is failure to deliver on time, not failure to deliver full stop.
I also think a lot of places claim to be agile, but don’t follow or understand the principles at all. Another commenter here is the perfect example of that where they say the opposite of what’s in the agile manifesto and claim that it’s a representation of what it says.
Maybe that’s a fundamental problem with agile. It’s just a set of loose principles rather than a concrete methodology being pushed for by a company and it has therefore been bastardised by consulting companies and scrum masters claiming to teach the checklist of practices that will make your company agile. Such a checklist does not exist, it’s just a set of ideas to keep in mind while you work out the detailed processes or lack thereof that work for you.
For anyone that wants to refresh their memory on the agile manifesto:
Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
Working software over comprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Responding to change over following a plan
That is, while there is value in the items on
the right, we value the items on the left more.
Agile was designed for contractors to deliver contract work. It’s a terrible design for any sort of sustainable business plan, hence “working software over comprehensive documentation”. That line right there causes the majority of outages you as a consumer encounter.
Especially that working software over comprehensive documentation part, which can be automated so easily if done right.
There’s so much value in TDD and providing a way to do integration and automated UI tests early on in a project, yet none of the companies I’ve worked at made use of it.
Also automated documentation tools like Swagger are almost criminally underutilised.
Would you rather have working software or a bunch of documentation? If your software is having outages then by definition it is not working. If documentation is the root cause of that then you should fix that by creating enough documentation to allow your software to continue to work per “working software over comprehensive documentation”. Maybe I’m missing something but I don’t see the contradiction here.
Note that this is failure to deliver on time, not failure to deliver full stop.
I also think a lot of places claim to be agile, but don’t follow or understand the principles at all. Another commenter here is the perfect example of that where they say the opposite of what’s in the agile manifesto and claim that it’s a representation of what it says.
Maybe that’s a fundamental problem with agile. It’s just a set of loose principles rather than a concrete methodology being pushed for by a company and it has therefore been bastardised by consulting companies and scrum masters claiming to teach the checklist of practices that will make your company agile. Such a checklist does not exist, it’s just a set of ideas to keep in mind while you work out the detailed processes or lack thereof that work for you.
For anyone that wants to refresh their memory on the agile manifesto:
Agile was designed for contractors to deliver contract work. It’s a terrible design for any sort of sustainable business plan, hence “working software over comprehensive documentation”. That line right there causes the majority of outages you as a consumer encounter.
The very first mistake most people make when reading the agile manifesto is that “a over b” means “don’t do b”.
100% that.
Especially that working software over comprehensive documentation part, which can be automated so easily if done right.
There’s so much value in TDD and providing a way to do integration and automated UI tests early on in a project, yet none of the companies I’ve worked at made use of it.
Also automated documentation tools like Swagger are almost criminally underutilised.
Would you rather have working software or a bunch of documentation? If your software is having outages then by definition it is not working. If documentation is the root cause of that then you should fix that by creating enough documentation to allow your software to continue to work per “working software over comprehensive documentation”. Maybe I’m missing something but I don’t see the contradiction here.