We all knew it
One standout statistic was that projects with clear requirements documented before development started were 97 percent more likely to succeed.
I’d like to work in that company.
Try medical software and devices. The requirements and specs are mandatory before doing anything. It’s actually very fun and I have less burnout thanks to this.
I couldn’t disagree more.
In medical I would end up being apart of endless retirement gathering meetings, then draft up the SOW doc only to have stakeholders change requirements when they were reviewing the doc. Then months later once the doc was finally finished and I could do the development, when UAT time finally came, they’d say the build wasn’t what they wanted (though it matched the written requirements).
Most of the projects I saw executed in the last 4 years either got scrapped altogether or got bogged down in political bs for months trying to get the requirements “just right”.
It was a nightmare. You could blame me, or the company, or bad processes all you want, but I’ve never had fun on a waterfall project, especially not in medical. (Though, in my opinion, we are severely understaffed and need like 4 more BAs.)
It’s almost like the methodology is less important than the people.
Do you think the problem is that the person driving the requirements doesn’t know what they actually want?
I think a good BA is critical to the process because lots of end users have no idea how to put their ideas onto paper.
I also think an MVP helps a lot because people can see and touch it which helps focus their needs.
I would say yes, the problem is stakeholders not having thought critically about what they really wanted from the project.
The motivation for projects were usually “regulatory told us we need to have this new metric for federal reporting”, or “so-and-so’s company can do this, why can’t ours” rather than, “we’d like to increase retention by 6% and here’s the approach we’ve researched to make that happen”.
I ended up experiencing that people in the highest positions weren’t experts in their field, but just people who had a strong intuition. This meant they would zero-in on what they wanted by trial and error rather than logic. Likewise, it meant they were socially adept enough so their higher-ups would never get mad at them when we finished “late and over budget”. People lower on the totem received that blame.
I think humans are just really bad at estimating and keeping their commitments, which is why I enjoy working with agile more. It’s a forgiving framework (imo).
No thanks. It’s way more fun to be part of the decision process. If a manager can anticipate all of the requirements and quirks of the project before it even starts, it’s probably going to be a really boring, vanilla project at which point it’s probably just better to but the software.ä somewhere else.
Creating something new is an art in itself. Why would you not want to be a part of that?
Also: Isn’t it cheating to compare the two approaches when one of them is defined as having all the planning “outside” of the project scope? I would bet that the statistics in this report disregard ll those projects that died in the planning phase, leaving only the almost completed, easy project to succeed at a high rate.
It would be interesting to also compare the time/resources spent before each project died. My hunch is that for failed agile project, less total investment has been made before killing it off, as compared to front loading all of that project planning before the decision is made not to continue.
Complementary to this, I also think that Agile can have a tendency to keep alive projects that should have failed on the planning stage. “We do things not because they are easy, but we thought they would be easy”. Underestimating happens for all project but for Agile, there should be a higher tendency to keep going because “we’re almost done”, forever.
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That’s because they forgot the meaning of the word agility and want to apply the rules what ever the cost
And also because it’s a comfortable cover up for any kind of money saving stupidity. We don’t need proper requirements engineering, we’re agile. We don’t need an operations team we’re doing an agile DevOps approach. We don’t need frontend Devs, we’re an agile team you all need to be full stack. I have often seen agility as an excuse to push more works towards the devs who aren’t trained to do any of those tasks.
Also common problem is that still tons of people believe agile means unplanned. This definitely also contributes to projects failing that are just agile by name.
100% my experience.
A lot of places seem to view it as “we just work from the backlog” with no requirements on when features are delivered, or their impacts on other parts of the project.
You still need a plan, goals and a timeline. Not just a bucket of stuff to get done.
Or, even worse, they want to apply some of the rules, cherry-picking bits and pieces of a framework without truly understanding it.
Today, new research conducted for a new book, Impact Engineering, has shown that 65% software projects adopting Agile requirements engineering practices fail to be delivered on time and within budget, to a high standard of quality. By contrast, projects adopting a new Impact Engineering approach detailed in a new book released today only failed 10% of the time.
All you need to know about this study.
It almost sounds like a project team that is actually and actively looking to solve known and recurring problems instead of “just do whatever everyone else is kind of doing” might be why they are successful.
It’s the difference between “how should we go about this” vs “see how we go” regardless of what you label those approaches as.
I think the take away should be:
new research conducted for a new book, Impact Engineering,
By contrast, projects adopting a new Impact Engineering approach detailed in a new book released today only failed 10% of the time.
So the people who want to sell you ‘Impact Engineering’ say ‘Impact Engineering’ is better than Agile… Hardly an objective source.
Even if they have success with their ‘Impact Engineering’ methodology, the second it becomes an Agile-level buzzword is the second it also becomes crap.
The short of the real problem is that the typical software development project is subject to piss poor management, business planning, and/or developers and that piss poor management is always looking for some ‘quick fix’ in methodology to wave a wand and get business success without across the board competency.
Oh yeah. I totally agree that the source has its own objective. I wasn’t supporting their specific approach at all.
You are right that the key take away is somene saying “I think my own idea, which I happen to be selling a book about, is great, here are some stats that I have crafted to support my own agenda”
The point I was making was simply that people who care enough to try something, anything, with thought (like looking for a new methodology to try out) are likely to be more successful.
Like a diet. The specific one doesn’t matter so much. It’s the fact that you are actually paying attention and making a specific effort.
Pbpbpbp…agile fails fast by design.
The counter from the article is you need a specification first, and if you reveal the system wasn’t going to work during requirements gathering and architecture, then it didn’t count as a failure.
However, in my experience, architects are vastly over priced resources and specifications cost you almost as much as the rest of the project due to it.
TLDR…it’s a shit article that confuses fail fast with failure.
Fail fast is the whole point and the beauty of agile. Better to meet with clients early and understand if a project is even workable rather than dedicating a bunch of resources to it up front and then finding out six months in (once the sunk cost fallacy has become too powerful)
Thanks for pointing that out so I didn’t have to.
What’s the alternative? Waterfail?
Yeah because business requirements and technology is changing at an ever slower rate…
If you know exactly what you need, then specs are great. Proven solutions for known problems are awesome. Agile is pointless in that circumstance.
But I can count on one hand the number of times stakeholders, or clients, actually know what they want ahead of time and accept what was built to spec with no amends.
When there is any uncertainty, changing a spec under waterfall is significantly worse. Contract negotiation in fixed price is a fucking nightmare of the client insisting the sky is red when the signed off spec states it’s to be green.
Personally, I was never great with agile projects. I get that it’s good for most and sort of used it when I was a CTO but as a solo developer, there are days when I’d rather eat a bowl of hair than write code and then some days, I’ll work all night because I got inspired to finish a whole feature.
I realize I’m probably an exception that maybe proves the rule but I loathed daily stand-ups. Most people probably need the structure. I was more of a “Give me a goal and a deadline and leave me alone, especially at 9am.” person. (Relatedly, I was also a terrible high school student and amazing at college. Give me a book and a paper to write and you’ll have your paper. If you have daily bullshit and participation points, I’ll do enough to pass but no more.)
It’s very likely that as a sole developer you are actually practicing agile as it’s intended and not corporate “agile”.
There isn’t a problem with agile there’s a problem with it being mislabeled and misused as a corporate & marketing tool for things that have nothing to do with agile.
Stand-ups can become so proforma. What did you do yesterday? I coded. What are you doing today? I am going to code. Do you have any blockers? No. It gets a little repetitive after a while.
I did twice a week when I was management: once at the start of a sprint, once on the first Friday where we only identified blockers, and once the following Wednesday where we talked about what can ship and be ready for QA.
The goal was to have a release fully ready on Thursday so Friday could be for emergency bug fixes but most releases are fine. If everything is perfect, great! Everyone go have a three day weekend. If QA catches a bug or two, we fix it and then ship.
If a deadline is gonna slip, just tell me when you know. It’s not usually a big deal.
I found them to be useful because I usee to be in an erratic team where people either get a lot done or drag projects on for years. At least the project draggers had no place to hide when needing to report their project daily.
In my current job we only have these stand-up type meetings once weekly which made a big difference because many people had more interesting things to report and it wasn’t some kind of lip service, instead people were genuinely haring progress.
I think you are missing the part where you help others with their blockers.
In my workplace, that happens in the moment of the blocker being incurred. When people are continually in communication, the daily standup is redundant and frequently for the sake of some manager/project manager who “technically” shouldn’t be part of the standup.
If someone is blocked I’d be pretty cranky if they waited until the next day to mention it. Blockers are to be dealt with swiftly and with extreme prejudice.
Yeah. I can see in your case a stand up could be replaced with a status update message.
Feels like the old php metric. PHP had a ton of great code and successful projects but it also attracted very bad devs as well as very inexperienced devs leading to a real quality problem.
Honestly kinda see thing in a lot of JavaScript applications these days. Brilliant code but also a ton of bad code to the point I get nervous opening a new project.
My point? It may be a tough pill but it’s not the project framework that makes projects fail, it’s how the project is run.
I witnessed a huge number of failed projects in my 25-year career. The cause was almost always the same: inexperienced developers trying to create a reusable product that could be applied to imagined future scenarios, leading to a vastly overcomplicated mess that couldn’t even satisfy the needs of the original client. Made no difference what the language or framework was or what development methodology was utilized.
I feel like that’s the same underlying issue: The requirements are not understood upfront.
If a customer cannot give you any specific information, you cannot cut any corners. You’re pretty much forced to build a general framework, so that as the requirements become clearer, you’re still equipped to handle them.
I guess, the alternative is building a prototype, which you’re allowed to throw away afterwards. I’ve never been able to do that, because our management does not understand that concept.
I feel like that’s the same underlying issue: The requirements are not understood upfront.
Actually on most of these failed projects the requirements of the original customer were pretty clear. But the developers tried to go far beyond those original requirements. It is fair to say that the future requirements were not well understood.
the alternative is building a prototype, which you’re allowed to throw away afterwards
Lol I’ve done many prototypes. The problem is that management sees them and says “oh, so we’re finished with the project already? Yay!”
I’ve seen a lot of contractors over promising timelines too. “No matter how hard you push and no matter what the priority, you can’t increase the speed of light.”
But yeah exactly.
Preach brother!
Agile falls into the category of how the project is run
No it’s a set of tools you can use to run a project.
My point is that a lot of people use “agile” to mean not planning or don’t put guard rails on scope and they fail. That’s not agile, it’s just bad PM
Agreed.
Being Agile is being flexible. To do that you need to plan for multiple contingencies. Resulting in more planning, not none.
“agile” is being flexible. Being “Agile” more often than not means your company’s incompetent management paid some hack consultants to come in and bless your flavor of stupid bureaucracy as “Agile”.
Yeah, look at the most prolific language at a given time. There’s your crappy projects or your soon-to-be-crappy projects. What are the universities and ‘coding academies teaching’? That’s going to be the crappiest stuff in the world when those students come out.
So too it goes with ‘management’, the popular ‘self-help’ style crap of the moment is what crappy teams will adopt, and no matter what methodology it is, that crap team is still crap, and it will reflect on that methodology.
Isn’t it more that people tend to use agile as an excuse for not having any kind of project plan.
It’d be interesting to know how many of those agile projects actually had an expert project lead versus just some random person who was picked who isn’t actually experienced in project management.
In my experience It’s not about a project plan for features, but actually doings things correctly instead of doing the minimum to finish what you need to do on the current sprint.
I’d say it’s that people tend to use Agile because consultants tell them they can be piss poor managers dealing with the crappiest developers and stupid business ideas and still make awesome stuff if they just make everything buzzword compatible.
I’d say projects without much of an upfront project plan can still be very successful, but it’s all about having a quality team, which isn’t something a two week ‘training and consultancy’ session isn’t going to get you, so there’s no big marketing behind that sort of message.
Agreed. We follow agile, and we have a team of product owners who know where the project is likely headed in the next 3 years. Our sprint to sprint is usually pretty predictable, but we can and do make adjustments when new requirements come in. The product team decides how and when to adjust priorities, and they do a good job minimizing surprises.
It works pretty well imo, and it hinges on the product team knowing what they’re doing.
Isn’t it more that people tend to use agile as an excuse for not having any kind of project plan.
I’d say it’s more about continuously milking customers on projects that never seem to end. I’ve never done software project management, but I have seen it’s “tenets” applied to other types of projects. The results were arduous - to say the least.
I’ve seen it being done even on internal projects though. Things within an organization.
It tends to be that they start developing a feature and then someone comes along and says, ooh wouldn’t it be nice if it did x, so they modify it to have x feature. Then someone decides it should be able to sync with Azure (there’s always someone that wants that), so Azure sync is added, but now that interferes with x, so that has to be modified so that it can sync as well. Then we get back to original product development which is now 3 weeks behind schedule.
Repeat that enough times and you can see why a lot of this stuff fails.
Even internal projects have a facet of ‘milking customers’ even those customers are internal. There’s a rather large internal team that has managed to last years by milking the fact their stuff always sucks but any moment when they are challenged about their projects they always have a plan to fix all that’s wrong within ‘3 months’.
During my project management days one of the things I learned the hard way is to nail down exactly what something has to deliver and getting everybody involved to sign onto it in black and white - if you don’t, disaster follows.
Agile seems literally designed to make this impossible.
I’m all for and good eye rolling at institutional Agile (basically checkered with bad management who doesn’t know what to do, but abuses buzz words and asserts Agile instead), but this article has a lot of issues.
For one, it’s a plug for someone’s consultancy, banking on recognition that, like always, crappy teams deliver crappy results and “Agile” didn’t fix it, but I promise I have a methodology to make your bad team good.
For another, it seems to gauge success based on how developers felt if they succeeded. Developers will always gripe about evolving requirements, so if they think requirements were set in stone early, they will proclaim greatness (even if the users/customers hate it and it’s a commercial failure).
Does that surprise me? Not at all. “Agile” was never about making programming better. It was a management buzzword from the start.
We once had a manager who came to me with the serious idea “to make the development process agile”. He had heard of this in a discussion with managers from other companies. The problem? I’m the only person in this department. I program everything alone. How the F should I turn my processes “agile”?
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I think he wanted it more like Product Owner, Scrum Master, Architect, Stakeholder, New product development, Tester, Integrator, Team member, Agile architect, Agile Coach, Developer, Team lead, Technical expert, Product Designer, Business Analyst, Programmer, and Specialist for at least eight hours a day in each role…
Cries in waterfall.
This article doesn’t make any sense. A project’s “success” can’t really be measured in any objective way like the article is implying. Even saying that a project is “on time” is a vague statement depending on the situation, and it’s not a good way to measure the quality of the end result or the efficiency of the development team.
The article even states this is a thinly veiled ad for some other “method”.
The agile manifesto is fantastic. Scrum can work wonders as a means for providing a framework to hang “agile principles” onto.
Most organizations don’t do “scrum” well or quickly lose sight of the “why” behind it.
Companies are gonna company at the end of the day. Process + bureaucracy + buzzwords + ill-informed management + vendors promises + shit customers/product owners = late projects.
Agile done right, works. The benefit agile has over waterfall(the process it replaced in a lot of places), imo, is that it’s predicated on working software, responding to change and working collaboratively/iteratively.
Imo waterfall is an imagined beast for most software devs today. I worked on many successful waterfall projects. It was nowhere as bad as the caricature that people imagine.
… I cannot count the number of times at my different workplaces where we had an agile process, dailies and everything else of the agile BS for projects which where either trivial or not solvable. No worries, the managers, product owners and agile coaches made money and felt good, we developers went for greener pastures…
Agile is a scam, nothing they do is based on any facts and when you challenge agile coaches / other people which profit it is always ‘I believe’ or ‘proven by anecdote’.
Combine this with the low quality of people in the average software projects and you have a receipt for failure.
Writing the requirements first at least forces people to think trough a project (even if only superficial), so I am not surprised the success rates for this projects goes up.
Agile has its uses, but like everything you need a bit of both. You need a bit of both waterfall and agile.
Example : you need to have your requirements before development, yes. But how far do you go in your requirements? If i were to make all the requirements for my current project ill still be busy in 3 years and will have to redo bits due to law and workflows changing. however , we need requirements to start development. We need to know what we need to make and what general direction it will be heading to a make correct software/code design.Agile also teaches you about feedback loops, which even with waterfall, you need to have to know that what youre developing is still up to spec with what the product owner is expecting. So even with waterfall, deliver features in parts or sit together at least once every x weeks to see if youre still good with the code/look/design.
Pure agile is bullshit, but so is pure waterfall. Anything that isnt a mix is bullshit and in the end, it all depends on the project, the team and the time/money constraints.
Exactly!
I worked at one Agile place they had all their sprints and milestones in a Gantt Chart waterfall. They also did big design up front and a lot of process. They had do all kind agile and scrum training, but it was the most process heavy place I worked.
Im currently trying to steer a product team to have this kind of process. They are working with an ancient piece of software that is slowly being replaced. However, we need to replace piece by piece while the main app is still being maintained because of law and workflow changes. This is why i want them to set the requirements and designs up front a bit so we can make a good analysis of it before development starts so no technical difficulties or questions arise mid development! However, nothing is set in stone and after each small piece ( aka after each sprint ) we have our review and product owners and stakeholders see what we have made and can chime in, causing us sometimes to pivot what we were making.
Best of both worlds!Rewrites are great. You have a specification that is so defined it is literally code.
When it’s blue sky, it’s harder. Plans will be wrong. The users don’t understand really what they need or want. It all ends up evolving. Anything with a GUI is worse because users/customers need (want) things moved about, re-themed, with no regard to what’s below. Best to nail them to mock up designs they signed off on. Same with API interfaces. If they signed off on the design, you can then point out “spec change” and get more time/money. It’s more about ass covering than using the outcome or process.
Agreed. Depending in what branch or situation youre in you need handle appropriately and cover your arse but also make it work. If i was to work on a timed project, and the project is set to not make the deadline due to spec changes i will report that ahead of tine to cover the teams arses, but at least we can pivot and deliver something that will be useful and up to spec depending on the feedback :)
I don’t think there is a way that always works.
It’s not always possible to get a clear spec and do big design up front in R&D. The whole point can be to work out what can be done and how.
Correct! Hence why i said it all depends on the product, the team, the time, money, project, …
Many factors that decide on how to tackle things and the problems :)
Good points, and I mostly agree with you, especially with feedback loops!
Still, I never argued for waterfall. This is a false dichotomy which - again - comes from the agile BS crowd. The waterfall UML diagram upfront, model driven and other attempts of the 90s/early 20s were and are BS, which was obvious for most of us developers, even back then.
Very obviously requirements can change because of various reasons, things sometimes have to be tried out etc. I keep my point, that there has to exist requirements and a plan first, so one can actually find meaningful feedback loops, incorporate feedback meaningfully and understand what needs to be adapted/changed and what ripple effects some changes will have.
Call it an iterative process with a focus on understanding/learning. I refuse to call this in any way agile. :-P
