Since the transition from Waterfall to Agile, Agile has become a predominant approach for enterprises’ development. Although that was a radical shift, the world generally acknowledges that Agile created increasing amount of opportunities for software success. However, the world is driven by software and technology, it is changing at a rapid pace. While most of the enterprises still struggling with transitioning from Waterfall to Agile, the piling up of problems of Agile started to appear.
During the lecture, we were completely aware of the rise of Agile development is because of the product development teams demanded a new way to meet the new requirements such as E-commerce and real-time news update. After the new solution of Agile came up, the comparison between Agile and Waterfall made us realize waterfall is a “deeply flawed” approach. Now, the limitations and complaints about Agile have been persistent for a while, the problems of Agile are as following, but not limited to: not paying attention to software architecture; not caring on reusable code building; no self-organization; no active participation of stakeholders. Additionally, “continuous development” is Agile’s key value, Agile is expected to improve development throughout the organizations continuously but it does not have standards and approaches to the details that lead to the development. So it also causes the problems like bad quality of output product and dissatisfaction of employees.
So if not Agile, then what? In most situations, the answer comes to Lean and DevOps. Lean development is actually derived from Lean manufacturing and Agile, in Lean development the empowered team has to take responsibilities from the beginning to the finish of one product so that it enhance the collaboration between teams, and it is designed to be more adapted to changes and failure.
Agile was expected to realize the breaking down silos of development and quality assurance and it turned out to be a failure, but DevOps should become the best choice to meet this new requirement. DevOps hit the goal of “continuous delivery”. It is hard to say DevOps can completely replace Agile, but it seems a combination of Agile, DevOps and Lean is the answer to the question of “what’s after Agile”.
The information is helpful to MIS professional because in this changeable and software-driven world we have to adapt to series of implementation of software. Since we already knew the convergence of three approaches might be the new revolution in software development, and it absolutely brings more work to do than only one Agile, the question comes to how to deal with the chaos produced by the convergence.
Reference:
Bloomberg, Jason. "Has Agile Outlived Its Usefulness?" Forbes. Forbes Magazine, 11 Dec. 2015. Web. 29 Feb. 2016.
I think you need to talk more about why Agile is useful than others.
ReplyDeleteI think there are several valid points as to whether or not agile development is in the waning stages of its life, but in my opinion, there is still great value in Agile. The problems with agile, such as the unmotivated self-organization, are also what makes it so beautiful. Agile development is a methodology that is sophisticated enough to illicit significant results, but also simplistic enough to be adopted by the masses. It is suggested that lean operations be implemented in place of Agile, but with their processes being based off the same principles, can we be so sure that the benefit of changing processes will justify the costs? The same goes for devops. Personally, I feel that Agile still has a great deal of potential to tapped and should not be written off so quickly.
ReplyDeleteIt's not that Agile is not useful. Much of the DevOps world still uses a very agile (MVP) approach in deployment. It's just that agile should not stop at just development.
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