I’m So Done With Agile

By John Morgan from Walnut Creek, CA, USA — BIG WheelUploaded by LongLiveRock, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7192029

Every development project ultimately has a goal of providing some kind of value to the organization that has decided to initiate a software development project.

The bottom line of any software development project is the bottom line. Does the up front cost of the project AND the maintenance of the project create a profit?

I know what you are thinking. Not all software applications are designed to produce profit. Untrue. Even applications we call “internal” create value or contribute to the creation of value.

Let’s talk about and characterize failure first. Because it’s much easier to define (as anyone who has had the misfortune of working with a team that cannot define “done” knows). And I’ve been told that that most software development projects fail. ;-)

Failure Is When…

1. The project is canceled. This is the “first order broke” condition of projects. It took too long, it went over budget and looked to continue to be a money pit (someone understood the fallacy of sunk costs), the environment changed making the application moot or a new CEO decided to replace all internal applications with some SaaS, PaaS, or his own pet project.
2. The application was launched and did not meet the goals of the project. This can mean a lot of things: the project does not solve enough of…