Agile Development - It's Human Nature

The Agile Manifesto claims that the benefits of Agile Development come in part from "People over Process". That never sat quite right with me, but I could never put my finger on why. An obvious reason of course is that I work for AccuRev, a development tool vendor that specializes in process-centric SCM. So of course I must love lots and lots of complicated process that requires a tool to implement. Actually, I'm a big believer in simplicity and automation.

I believe that attitude, people, and culture have always been important to the success of any project. Therefore, I don’t agree that there is anything special about Agile when it comes to attitude, people, or culture. It may well be that current Agile projects are populated by risk takers and visionaries, but if that was what it required to succeed, then it would never become very popular.

In my opinion, all of the benefits of Agile Development can be directly attributed to the practice of short iterations. That said, simply changing your plans to release more often, say every month, won’t work. While it doesn’t matter how you get to short iterations, you do have to do things differently to get there and many of the practices associated with Agile Development are good candidates for doing it.

Over time, I’ve come to realize that there is in fact something special and people-oriented about Agile. Ironically, it is the process that makes it people-oriented. I believe that short iterations leverage human nature and thus allow us to fall into a more natural rythym in which we make fewer mistakes and we work more productively. While it is true that people can succeed on projects that have very long timeframes and involve a high degree of stress at the end, I believe that people are much more productive and much less prone to error when they work at a constant and sustainable pace. This also means that when there are unforeseen circumstances, people are more likely to be able to respond well.

Consider the following statements. I’ll bet that you’ll agree with most of them.

• When working on software for personal use, people make changes and then use the new version right away.

• One of the things that developers enjoy about software development is the fact that they can make a change and see the result right away.

• When working on a hotfix, people are more likely to cross all of the “t”s and dot all of the “i”s and take extra care to make sure that everything is done just right.

• It isn’t easy to create something that the customer thinks is exactly right the first time.

• People prefer to delay making important decisions as long as possible.

• Towards the end of a release when a new bug is found or a great idea for an enhancement comes in, it is tempting to just put it into the current release rather than the next release because the next release won’t happen for quite a while.

Each of these are a part of human nature. All of the positive parts are reinforced with short iterations, and all of the negative parts are reduced with short iterations. Conversely, long iterations work against the grain of human nature.