Ah, that doesn’t cover UI so lets dust off selenium and watin etc. Hmm, all that is hard to retrofit so we’ll have to use TDD. Ok with that much decoupling our automated integration testing will need to be 100% too. Ah then we’ll need DI/IOC/Mocking on pretty much every class. So you will need 100% unit testing coverage of course. Consider the following thought process that is remarkably common :Īgile is a must right? Hmm, we can’t manually test all this every 4 weeks. What is worse the whole process has become so ingrained that developers can’t even see how mired in it they have become. As a consultant I get a peek into many dev teams and overall productivity has evaporated and the focus seems to be fulfilling the requirements of the process rather than on producing the best possible software. Agile/Scrum fell down due to the unrealistic expectation that you didn’t need a global technical design, that businesses could afford the weight of testing and release (automated or not) and that business stakeholders would actually want to be continually involved.Īgile has become the monster that Waterfall could only have dreamed of. Waterfall fell down due to an unrealistic expectation that scope wouldn’t slip and that design on paper would translate into good working software. Truefully Scrum and other “Agile” pseudo project management methodologies have the same problem that waterfall had unrealistic expectations. I had got to the point of feeling isolated out of development completely purely down to the fact that even mentioning the short comings of Agile (as it has been applied) labels me as an unprofessional lunatic.

A thousand cuts 2012