Agility and following a "Strictly Agile" approach

I've seen some discussion on Stack Overflow that is best characterized by the question: "What is Strictly Agile?", or "What's the Official Agile Approach?".

Someone shared this with me recently: "Process kills developer passion".

I have also heard some great complaints about organizations that claim "Agile" and actually do nothing of the kind. In some cases it's not a "crunchy agile shell" around a waterfall process; it's a simple lie. Nothing about the process is Agile except a manager insisting that all the status reporting, planning and unprioritized lists of random requirements are Agile.

Finally, I got this weird suggestion: "consider writing a blog about how to test if you are agile or not". It's weird because testing for Agile is like testing for breathing; it's like testing for flammability.

The Agile Test

Testing if your project is Agile can be done two ways.

1. Practical. Make a change to the project. Any change. Requirements, architecture, due dates, staff, anything. Does it derail? If so, it wasn't very Agile, was it?
2. Theoretical. Reread the Agile Manifesto. Make a score card that evaluates the project on each of the eight basic criteria in the Agile manifesto. Convene all the project stakeholders. Conduct careful surveys and have structured walkthroughs to determine the degree of Agility surrounding each person, deliverable, collaborative relationship and issue.

An important point is that Agile is not absolute. Some practices are more Agile than others. There's no "strictly" Agile. There are ways to make a project more Agile; that is, it can effectively cope with change. There are ways to make a project less Agile; that is, change causes problems and can derail the project completely.

The canonical example is a missing, misstated or contradictory requirement that gets uncovered after coding and during user acceptance test. Clearly, that feature has been built and is absolutely wrong. What happens next?

Agile? The product can be released with with the broken feature relegated to the next release. A hack is put in to remove the buttons or menu items or links until they work.

Not Agile? Everyone works around the clock to make that feature work no matter what. Paraphrasing Admiral Farragut: "Technical debt be damned. Development must proceedfull speed ahead." All of this irrespective of the relative value of what's being developed. Schedule comes first; features second.

How Much Process?

The "Process Kills..." blog entry repeats observation that a lot of carefully-defined process isn't really all that helpful. It identifies a cause ("process kills passion") that's can be true, but it's largely irrelevant. Process is—essentially—work that's not focused on delivering anything of real value. Complex processes are "meta" work; it's work focused on IT internals; it's work that creates no value for the users of the software; work that replaces the more valuable elements of the Agile Manifesto.

One can argue that processes, documentation, contracts and plans "assure" success or demonstrate some level of quality. To an extent all the process and meta-work creates trust that—eventually—the resulting software product will solve the original problem.

The mistake is that non-Agile methods use a series of surrogates—processes, documentation, contracts and plans—instead of actual software. The point of Agile methods it to release software early and often and avoid using surrogates.

Key Points of Agile

Here are the key points of the Agile Manifesto.

• Individuals and interactions over processes and tools. A more Agile project will use the best people and encourage them to talk amongst themselves. A less Agile project will write a lot of things (which folks don't have time or reward for reading.) There will be misunderstandings, leading to large, boring meetings where someone reads powerpoint slides to other folks to try and clear up misunderstandings.
• Working software over comprehensive documentation. A more Agile project uses frequent release cycles of incremental software. A less Agile project attempts to gather all requirements, do all design and then try to do all the coding even though the requirements have already been found to be less than crystal clear.
• Customer collaboration over contract negotiation. A more Agile project uses constant contact with customer and product owner to refine and prioritize the requirements. A less Agile project uses a complex change control process to notify everyone of a requirements change, which leads to design and code changes, and has cost and schedule impact that must be carefully planned and documented.
• Responding to change over following a plan. A more Agile project uses incremental releases, conversation and a modicum of discipline to build things of value. Just because someone thought it should be included in the requirements doesn't mean the feature is really required.

The "Process Kills Passion?" Question

There Process Kills Passion blog lists a bunch of things that—it appears—some folks find burdensome:

• Doing full TDD, writing your tests before you wrote any implementing code.
• Requiring some arbitrary percentage of code coverage before check-in.
• Having full code reviews on all check-ins.
• Using tools like Coverity to generate code complexity numbers and requiring developers to refactor code that has too high a complexity rating.
• Generating headlines, stories and tasks.
• Grooming stories before each sprint.
• Sitting through planning sessions.
• Tracking your time to generate burn-down charts for management.

This list has three different collections of practices.

• Good. TDD, code reviews, generating headlines, stories and tasks, grooming stories before each sprint and doing some planning for each sprint are all simply good ideas. They must be done. "Pure Coding" is not a good way to invest time. Planning and then coding is much smarter, no matter how boring planning appears.
• Difficult. Test code coverage can be helpful, but can also devolve to empty numerosity. 20% more coverage doesn't not mean 20% fewer bugs. Nor does it mean 20% less chance of uncovering a bug at run time. Code complexity ratings are also fussy because they don't have a direct correlation with much. They must be done and used to prioritize work that will reduce technical debt. But mindless thresholds are for cowards who don't want to mediate deep technical discussions.
• Silly. Creating burn-down charts for management shouldn't be necessary. Everyone must read and understand the backlog. Everyone should build the summary charts they want from the backlog. The product owner or even the eventual customer should do this on their own. They must be given a profound level of ownership of the features and the process for creating software.

I don't agree that process kills passion. I think there's a fine line between playing with software development and building software of value. I think that valuable software requires some discipline and requires executing a few burdensome tasks (like TDD) that create real value. Assuring 80% or 100% code coverage doesn't always create real value. Spending time keeping the backlog precise and complete is good; spending time making pictures is less good.