A Game You Can't Win
Despite working nights and weekends, your team is always “behind”, seemingly never able to catch up. Everyone has been working harder and harder, delivering more and more, while your customers are progressively becoming less and less satisfied. What’s going on here?
The Agile software development methodology was supposed to enable your team to be dynamic, by responding to the changing needs of the customer. Agile was supposed to enable you to deliver faster with higher customer satisfaction, but that's just not your real world experience. Something is amiss.
The problem: Deadlines. The reality is, Agile is not compatible with deadlines. Deadlines break Agile, and broken Agile makes bad software.
At its core, Agile is the recognition that we're not building widgets on an assembly line. We don't know exactly how many resources it will take, we don't know exactly how much time it will take, and we don't know how much scope we can accomplish. This is very often represented as an inverted "Iron Triangle".
For these triangles to remain triangles, the team must choose which axis are fixed and which are dynamic. Traditionally in Waterfall, scope is fixed, whereas, resources and time are dynamic. i.e. We have a set goal to accomplish and we'll work until it's done.
In Agile, the triangle is inverted, so resources and time are fixed and scope is dynamic. i.e. We will work for a sprint (fixed time), with the team we have today (fixed resources), and we'll deliver as much as we can (dynamic scope).
Ok, but how does this all relate to deadlines?
Let's first take a moment to describe what we mean by deadline. A common definition is: "A date or time before which something must be done." This definition implies a fixed date (date or time) and a fixed scope (something). These two components, when taken together, break the "iron triangle". This is one of the fundamental reasons deadlines are not compatible with Agile software development.
"One of" you say? Yes, follow along here or join the mailing list as we dive deeper into why deadlines break Agile and what to do about it.