Much has been written about the benefits of doing Agile software development. I won’t spew the various catch phrases and mantra’s that you’ll find across the web on agile, sufficient to say it has proven to work well for many people. With that said, there is a great number of developers who haven’t tried agile software development. Some because they just don’t buy into it, others because their organizations won’t let them, and others because they don’t know what it is. With all that’s been written about the benefits of Agile I think we often times forget to tell people that it isn’t the easiest thing in the world to do. While thats understandable given the fact that many people are trying to bring people to agile, not scare them away, I think we do run the risk of giving people a false sense of what is involved with doing agile development. It can be hard, it can be frustrating, and it can be painful.
This past week was one of those painful times. At the beginning of the week we went through our planning session and identified a single story that we were going to focus on for the week. While the story was quite large it wasn’t something that we didn’t think we could handle. As the week progressed we all felt we were making decent progress (we weren’t) and we all felt that we’d be able to meet our commitments (we didn’t). By Thursday afternoon many of us started to realize that we were in trouble. We’d have to put together a Herculean effort in order to finish everything that was left by Friday afternoon. As you might have guessed we didn’t make it, in fact we didn’t even come close. It sucked. To make matters worse we didn’t cut our loses on Friday afternoon. We all decided that we wanted to try and put some time in over the weekend to complete the story. After-all we had committed to finishing the story and we’ve done a pretty good job of meeting our commitments over the last several months. While we made an attempt it wasn’t nearly enough. It sucked…big time! To make matters worse today we broke down the remaining tasks required to complete the story and realized we had enough remaining work to fill up the entire next week. SH*T! How depressing.
When doing Agile software development your going to fall on your face from time to time, and it’s going to be painful. The Green bars might make you feel a little bit better but its still going to hurt. Lucky for you you’ll get to do it all over again “next week”.