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.
no shit, I feel most people can function in just about any framework, so long as everyone knows what they are building. I’ve seen agile (and other frameworks to be fair) as the ‘solution’ to missing requirements too often. Sure we can get to work without them, but to what end?
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I haven’t read the article yet, but surely they can’t be juxtaposing waterfall as the alternative to agile. The modern alternative, especially in small to medium businesses, would be kanban.
Kanban is Agile. They are pushing Impact Engineering.
Ehhhh…Kanban is much older than Agile even if they tried to subsume it and say it’s an agile technique, so that’s sort of right. But kanban vs “scrum” - which virtually everyone means when they say “agile” - is fair.
Within my company there is a mix of Scrum and Kanban, so Agile != Scrum.
I don’t think it makes much sense to say “We are switching from Agile to Kanban”, but “We are switching from Scrum to Kanban” does make sense (at least to me)
Well that’s news to me
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.
Especially the last part. Writing a single word into a jira ticket doesn’t make it a story, epic or sub task. You’re too lazy to specify, that’s not what agile is meant to be.
I don’t know how many times I have been waiting for the product manager to get out of their meeting so they can help me clarify what they really mean with their “high priority” ticket only consisting a vague title.
“Looks like I’m home early, bye”
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.
A more proper title would be “study finds 268% higher failure rates for poorly planned software projects”.
“Agile” as a word is mostly an excuse of poor planners for their poor planning skills.
Yeah, Agile isn’t really at fault here. If done right - if you’ve got a scrum master, a proper product owner, proper planning and backlog grooming, etc. - it works really well. The problem is some companies think Agile is just “give the devs some pie-in-the-sky hopes and dreams, let 'em loose, and if they don’t give half a dozen execs exactly what they want (despite their massively conflicting ideas on what they want), cancel the project.”
In one the worst “poor planning” projects I’ve been in the product owner just kept sneaking in new “high priority” issues to the top of the backlog throughout the sprint. I don’t think we had a single sprint where we ended up with fewer open issues in the backlog than when we started.
Needless to say, he was the main reason why I quit.
In my experience it’s just kanban, but make the devs feels guilty between sprints for not meeting their goals.
Absolutely It’s so management can say “your velocity was down 15% this sprint” and not feel bad about it instead of saying “work more” It’s plausible deniability for demanding unpaid overtime
Yeah, Agile isn’t really at fault here. If done right
This is what ticks me off about the “Agile” brand, it’s chock full of no true Scotsman fallacy (if a team failed while doing “Agile”, it means they weren’t being “Agile”).
I can appreciate sympathizing with some tenets as Agile might be presented, but the popularity and consultancy around it has pretty much ruined Agile as a brand.
Broadly speaking, any attempt to capture nuance of “best practices” into a brand word/phrase will be ruined the second it becomes “popular”.
This isn’t a case of No True Scotsman. There really is a right way and a whole lot of wrong ways to do Agile development. Any team that calls itself an Agile team that doesn’t actually follow the processes properly is doing it wrong and will fail.
That doesn’t mean any team that’s doing it right will succeed, but it’s like riding a horse: If you only climb halfway up the horse and try to hold on while at a 90-degree angle, it’s not going to work, and it would be stupid to declare that the concept of horse-riding is broken. No, it’s not broken, you’re just an idiot who thought you could ride a horse while only halfway up, clinging desperately to its side.
Any team that calls itself an Agile team that doesn’t actually follow the processes properly is doing it wrong and will fail.
I mean, this statement is also weird, to imply that not following Agile implies failure. I’d say it’s quite possible for a team to “falsely” execute on Agile and still pull off success. However, if that story is prominent and successful, no one is going to make a peep about it not being “true Agile”, they’ll only do that when it’s a failure.
But really this detail is beside the point, that people want to use ‘Agile’ as shorthand for good methodology, but it’s the way of the world that any shorthand that is popular will get co-opted and corrupted to the point of uselessness. You end up with various “interpretations” and so the meaning is diluted.
Now at a glance, this may seem an innocuous scenario, ok, Agile doesn’t “mean” anything specific in practice because of people abusing it to their objectives, but it still carries the weight of “authority”. So if you have a criticism like “there’s way too many stupid pointless required fields in our Jira implementation, and there’s a super convoluted workflow involving too many stakeholders to walk a simple ticket to completion”, then you get chastised because “our workflow is anchored in Agile, and you can easily see online that Agile makes success, so you obviously don’t understand success”. You can try to declare “Individuals and interactions over processes and tools”, but then they’ll say “oh, but the stuff on the right is valuable, and it’s used to facilitate the interactions between people”. Thanks to Atlassian marketing, for a lot of the corporate world if you implement it in Jira, then it is, by definition, “Agile” and your peons can shut up because you are right.
Basically, things get ruined by trying to abbreviate. You may be able to cite the Agile manifesto as something specific enough yet still short, though it’s still wishy washy enough to not be able to really “win” an argument with someone when deciding how you are going to move forward.
Agreed. The problem is people mistake “zero planning and structure” to mean “agile”. Of course it fails.
Agile to me was always mini waterfall. You always know who’s doing what, why, and what success looks like on a 2 week sprint horizon. When you see people on a sprint without a clear understanding of what they are doing over the next couple of weeks - then you know your project is in trouble for sure.
I don’t have much direct experience working in agile since I tend to work on the business side but I can tell you that the term agile is WAY overused. So many projects are described as agile when they are just waterfall with more steps. Leaders love to say they are working in agile because it sounds ‘techy’ and cool, but I don’t think they fully appreciate what it is vs other methods. I wonder if a lot of the failed projects described in the article are some of those agile in name only kind of things.
An even better title would be “‘Study’ by firm pushing new technique finds old technique is bad.”
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.
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…
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)
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.
If you know exactly what you need, then specs are great.
If you know exactly what you need and the specs are great, then you barely need project management framework at all.
Maybe I just work at shit companies, but it feels unrealistic to expect this this level of maturity from assigned work.
Well, exactly.
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 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 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 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!
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.
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…
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).
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.
Cries in waterfall.
… 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
The few times I’ve been on an agile project it amounted to start writing without understanding what product we’re building.
Yeah. Which actually doesn’t have to be bad as long as leadership accepts that this exploratory work (sometimes called a “spike”) might have to be thrown away, if findings reveal better paths.
The trouble begins when you start shipping your proof-of-concepts (without immediately paying back that tech debt).
It very quickly becomes an unmaintainable mess.
