The document addresses common myths and criticisms about agile development practices. It presents facts to counter claims that agile lacks discipline, does not involve planning, does not scale, and is not predictable. Each myth is addressed through examples of how agile practices like continuous integration, iterative planning and short feedback cycles actually increase discipline, adaptability, efficiency and predictability compared to traditional sequential approaches.

1. Agile Is Not Fragile
Sunil Mundra
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Addressing Agile Myths and Criticisms

2. Agile Lacks Discipline
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Facts:
• CI, TDD, Refactoring, Stand Ups and other
Agile practices are based on discipline
• Interdependencies among Agile practices
promote as well as demand discipline
• Consistently delivering high quality, valuable
and working software at frequent and regular
intervals requires discipline
• Discipline is bottom up, not imposed

3. Agile Teams Do Not Plan
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Facts:
• Planning effort is spread throughout the entire
project duration and is not compressed at the
beginning
• Continuous planning helps to adapt to changes
• Teams learn from incremental planning, which
increases planning accuracy

4. Agile Development Does Not Scale
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Facts:
• Smaller teams proven to be more efficient and
effective than larger teams
• Agile promotes breaking large projects into
smaller ones, which results in early exposure of
risk and delivering business value
• Functional and technical compatibility of work
done by smaller teams is ensured through
Continuous Integration

5. Agile Development Is Not Predictable
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Facts:
• Traditional activity-based plans often offer
‘perception of predictability’
• Agile planning is feature-based, resulting in
higher adaptability to change
• Iterative planning based on historical data leads
to greater reliability of metrics for future plans
• Agile metrics are very visual, which facilitate re-
planning quickly, thereby increasing their
predictability

6. Pair Programming Is Effort Duplication
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Facts:
• Leads to defect prevention, resulting in saving
of costs involved in fixing defects subsequently
• Significantly decreases chances of slackness
• Ensures knowledge sharing, thereby eliminating
person dependency
• The benefits of pair programming, though
always not tangible, outweigh the marginal loss
of producctivity

7. Too Many Meetings At Customers’
Expense
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Facts:
• Meetings foster collaboration not only between
team but with customer as well
• Higher collaboration leads to early identification
of risks and bottlenecks, shorter feedback
cycles and better alignment with customer
expectations
• Time spent on meetings is transparent to
customers
• Meetings are focused and short

8. Iterative Development Causes Waste
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Facts:
• Reduces project risk as functionalities of higher
risk and complexity are developed early
• Eliminates mismatch between customer
expectations and the developed solution
• Gives customer the opportunity to modify
requirements, before the modifications become
too costly to incorporate
• Allows customer to derive business value early

9. Estimates Are Unitless
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Facts:
• Story Points are a composite reflection of size
and complexity
• Time based estimation at story level is
consciously avoided,
• To prevent over and under estimation
• To recognize gains accruing from learning curve
• To insulate from unknown external factors
• To separate sizing from commitment

10. Estimates Are Inaccurate Due To
Relativity
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Facts:
• Humans better at comparative rather than
absolute measurements
• Easier to reach consensus
• Estimates, by definition, are not accurate
• Triangulation ensures consistency

11. Skewed Towards Coding Activity
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Facts:
• Coding is the biggest constraint to throughput
• Development time includes time towards
Quality Assurance and Continuous Integration
• Focus on delivering business value is
maintained as throughput is measured based
on completing user stories

12. TDD Is Unnecessary Extra Work
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Facts:
• Writing tests before coding makes design
robust
• Facilitates seamless integration of code
• Prevents propagation of errors, which are costly
to correct subsequently

13. Disregards Documentation
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Facts:
• Uses richer forms of communication and
collaboration
• Emphasis is on executable specifications rather
than bulky details
• Focus is on producing working software,
enabled by just enough and just in time
documentation

14. Unsuitable For Fix Bid Projects
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Facts:
• Issue is not methodology specific
• Customers generally unhappy due to:
• Project size larger than necessary as customers
contract for every requirement they can think of
• Solution provider charges risk premium to take
care of uncertainties
• Issue can be resolved through collaboration on
re-prioritization, and collaboration is core to
Agile philosophy

15. Loss Of Management Control
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Facts:
• Accountability is not lost, it is just moved from
individual level to team level
• Nature of management control changes from
command and direction to facilitation
• Comprehensive set of metrics can be used for
monitoring progress

16. Not Process Driven
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Facts:
• Recognizes that ‘one size fits all’ philosophy is
ineffective
• Believes in team empowerment, rather than
process enforcement
• Focus is on automation of repetitive processes

17. Agile Is A Silver Bullet
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Facts:
• Not a remedy for incompetence and poor
organization
• Choice of tools and practices is context
dependent
• Adaptable to requirement changes, but within
reasonable limits
• Does not advocate short cuts to excellence

18. Conclusion
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• Agile is relatively new, resulting in ‘fear of unknown’
• Agile combines the best of process, engineering and
development practices
• While Agile has guiding principles (manifesto), the
extent and nature of practices should be adopted based
on context
• Agile adopters have reported immediate and noticeable
improvements in managing requirements change,
stakeholder collaboration, accelerated delivery,
improved quality and project visibility

19. Questions?
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20. Thank You
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