Development of software is about the people, it has to be. Any methodology can be wrapped around any team, but for any of them to work, there has to be some talent, experience and a willingness to part of a team there – especially in technical and project leadership. Without it, the cost is expensive – both in morale and dollars.

Running an Agile project and managing it with scrum has worked considerably better in time and money costs than any waterfall or v-model project in my experience. However, I do believe Agile to some, is a like reading a software agreement – they scroll to the end reading very little, click “Accept”and done. We are now ‘Agile’. These projects fail usually and the methodology and/or people change shortly after.

There are shades of grey in best practices depending on the project. The common theme I’ve noticed is, that for an environment and the teams involved to perform at a high level, there has to be room to maneuver, accepting the fact that there are things that crop up that no one thought about until it’s right there, in front of you. These things happen and looking to blame people or the methodology and swapping some or all, because of perceived failure is like a drug addict looking for the next feel good hit of the dream that all milestones get hit on time, and/or the baby was not ugly in the first place.

Like I said, it is about people. And having watched a group of disparate individuals start a project and turn into a team after a few sprints – and produce great products, I know this approach works. As the article mentions, robots we aren’t.

Myself and a good friend and colleague presented to the Christchurch Agile Users group a few days ago; it went down quite well by the feedback we’ve been recieving – if you’re reading this and you were there, both myself and Ian are glad you enjoyed it – we enjoyed it too, the Q & A was excellent and it was great to get an insight into the way you guys go about your daily bread.

With some luck and senior management buy in around Christchurch (and New Zealand) Agile / Scrum as a way to go will prove the hype over time as the results are difficult to ignore. We want to improve the way business and software development is done and I personally have not found anything as effective (so far?!).