Review - Agile!: The Good, the Hype, and the Ugly

As I mentioned in my a previous post, I've been doing some reading around process.  A development process is one of those things that you always have, by definition.  It might be ill-defined and chaotic, and you might not even thingk about it, but eventually you go through some process to develop code.  But when you think about it, this process is going to have a not insubstantial impact on the quality of the software you produce.  After all, how could it not?

However, as developers, we often think of "process" as a dirty word.  It's one of those bureaucratic things imposed on us by pointy-haired project managers, with their Gantt charts and their Microsoft Project.  Sure, those highfalutin "processes" sold by over-priced consultants might be useful for those huge, soulless "enterprise" shops that have thousands of know-nothing drones cranking out Java ports of mainframe COBOL systems.  But we don't need those!  We're "code poets", "10x developers", "coding ninjas", etc.  We can code circles around a dozen of those enterprisey jokers in our sleep! 

Except it doesn't really work that way.  Even if you accept the notion that the best developers are ten or more times more effective than average ones, they still have to deal with the complications of ill-defined features, requirements changes, integration problems, performance problems, communication between stake-holders, and the myriad other issues that emerge and magnify as more people become involved in a project.  If you expect to make it through any decent sized project and not have it turn into a hot mess, you have to have some way of managing all the things that come up. Some organizations, such as the aforementioned Java-drone shop, do that by implementing processes that require mountains of paperwork that serve primarily to cover everyone's butt.  Others take the agile approach.

Cover of "Agile!: The Good, the Hype, and the Ugly"If you've been living in a cave for the past decade or so, the "agile" movement is a response to the stereotypical "big, up-front" processes of old.  The values of the agile community are summed up in the Agile Manifesto, but the basic idea is to focus less on the bureaucratic paper-pushing and more on delivering what the customer needs.  This generally sounds good to developers because it means less time spent on TPS reports and more time actually building software.  And it sounds good to managers because the iterative nature of agile development means you get the software faster (for certain definitions of "faster").  And it sounds very good to consultants who can offer agile training and certification.  So, naturally, everyone is talking about it.

That's where Bertrand Meyer's book Agile!: The Good, the Hype, and the Ugly comes in.  Its stated purpose is to separate the wheat from the chaff; that is, to pick out what's good about agile methods and what can be safely disregarded.  Meyer says it is intended as an even-handed and fact-based assessment to offset the hyperbole that often surrounds discussions of agile.

Part of what attracted me to this book was simply the fact that it's by Bertrand Meyer.  I first became aware of his work when researching for my Masters thesis.  He's probably best known as the originator of the idea of "design by contract" and Eiffel, and has a strong footing in formal methods, which is not usually the type of thing you'd associate with agile.  In fact, some people might consider it the opposite of agile.

Overall, I found the book not only enlightening, but also highly entertaining.  Meyer writes in an informal and even playful style.  While he does provide plenty of evidence and citations, he is also not light on the sarcasm - he's not shy about calling ideas stupid and harmful if that's what he thinks.  Sadly, this last point somewhat undercuts his claim to impartiality.  The "opinion" sections are helpfully marked with a marginal icon and they're just all over the place.  And while I don't think that Meyer has any anti-agile ax to grind, I was definitely left with the impression that the preponderance of his commentary was critical of agile.

Now, to be fair, criticizing agile is not a bad thing - every movement needs critics to keep it honest.  If the agile advocates you find on the web are any indication, much of the material out there is very "rah, rah agile" and this book is a bit of a reality-check.  While Meyer does give the agile movement credit for a number of good and even brilliant ideas, advocating for the greatness of agile is not the point.  The important thing is to critically examine it and not just take the press releases at face value.

One of the nice features of this book's structure is that it has book-ended assessments.  That is, Meyer ends the first chapter with an initial assessment of agile and then finishes the book with his final assessment of the good, hype, and ugly.  Though only a couple of pages, I found the initial assessment actually quite good as far as putting things in perspective.  He begins with this quote (apocryphally attributed to Samuel Johnson):

Your work, Sir, is both new and good, but what is new is not good and what is good is not new.

To me, this sets the stage, highlighting that, regardless of the hype, not all of the "innovations" in agile are actually new.  In fact, some have been around in different forms for years or even decades.  Of course, not all the good ideas are old and not all the new ideas are bad, but the point is that agile isn't quite as ground-breaking as some of the hype would have you believe. 

I won't get into the details of Meyer's analysis, but there are a few interesting items I'd like to point out.   First is his point that agile proponents (and many others in the industry) tend to work on the assumption that there are only two development models: agile and waterfall.  They use "waterfall" as a synonym for "anything that's not agile," which is both inaccurate and unfair (page 31).  Innaccurate because  "waterfall" is a specific lifecycle model proposed by Royce in the 1970's.  Unfair because there are many so-called "predictive" lifecycle models which are not the same as waterfall.  For example, the idea of iterative development has been around for a long time, except under other names like "spiral model".

Related to this, Meyer makes the interesting point that not all of the predictive processes out there actually preclude agile.  His big example of this is CMMI (page 44), which many (most?) of us think of as a super-heavy process that's only used by government defense contractors, and only because the government requires it.  However, he argues, if you really look at what CMMI is, there's no inherent contradiction with agile.  Of course, the marriage of the two is far from a no-brainer, but it is possible, as evidenced by a report on a Scrum team that was certified at CMMI level 5.

This is just part of what seems to be Meyer's biggest problem with agile methods - the deprecation of "big, up-front" tasks, which seems to be generalized to all up-front tasks.  He seems this as emblematic of a tendency in the agile movement to take a good idea and take it to the extreme.  It's invariably true that you can't get all the requirements right the first time, that the initial archtecture won't be perfect, that the initial plan won't work out perfectly, etc.  Nobody's perfect and we can't know everything - that's just life.  But does that really mean that we should just not plan out any of that out ahead of time at all?  Isn't that just as good of an argument for taking some more time to figure out a better plan up front?

My own experience the last few years has led me increasingly to sympathize with Meyer's views on this.  Like him, there are a lot of agile practices I think are great and helpful.  Short, time-boxed iterations with frequent deliveries are a great way to work and collect feedback; having a good product owner is priceless; and I don't think anybody really objects to heavy use of unit test suites and continuous integration anymore.  Let's keep those around.

But the more I think about and work with various "agile" processes, the clearer it becomes that there's a reason so many people seem to say that their organization "does Scrum," but not by the book - they have this and that modification, sometimes to the point that it no longer sounds like Scrum.  Some people interpret that as evidence that agile is nothing but hype.  After all, if nobody implements that actual process, then in what sense is it successful? 

Of course, that's not entirely fair because every team and organization is different so no process is going to be a perfect fit for everyone.  But on the other hand, is it entirely unfair either?  If hardly anyone seems to do things "by the book," could that be because the book is wrong?  Without more of the type of researched analysis that Meyer offers, we really have no way to know.

If you're interested in development processes, then Agile! The Good, the Hype, and the Ugly is definitely worth checking out.  I have to say that it really changed the way I think about agile processes.  For me, it really helped to put things in a wider perspective than the "good/new agile vs. bad/old waterfall" story that seems to dominate discussions.  And if nothing else, it's at least good to see some questioning and critical analysis of the agile mantra.

(Note: for a shorter read, Jim Bird has a very interesting take on agile in a similar vein to Meyer.)

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