I saw a question on a Q&A platform: is domestic agile development a disguised squeeze on labor force? Most of the answers are in support of agile development, but in many domestic enterprises just blindly follow the trend, and have not thought deeply about whether they are suitable for agile development, so in the process of practicing agile, there will be “fake agile” situation, which makes programmers complain.

It has to be admitted that agile development has become a trend. The rapidly changing market environment and severe competitive pressure put forward new requirements for products and research and development of enterprises, and agile development can just solve part of the problem (not all, there is no panacea).

Agile as a software development method, or project management method, it is easy to be said that the mystery, as if not agile, can not engage in research and development, but software development must be agile? The answer is clearly no.

With traditional software development using the waterfall development process, the whole process is divided into business research, requirements gathering, requirements analysis, design, code development, testing, and launch phase, each phase has set clear goals and standards, complete can enter into the next phase, after the entire process along the set target direction in the requirements document.

Waterfall development, on the one hand, can avoid the invalid input of resources, and on the other hand, effectively ensure the quality of development.

What does agile look like?

Agile refers to a software development model that responds to rapidly changing requirements. The core is rapid iteration, including Scrum, Kanban, Lean, XP, and a number of other methods. According to the Scrum Alliance’s 2018 Scrum Industry Survey report, 94% of respondents adopt Scrum in agile practices, indicating that Scrum is the mainstream way to practice Agile.

Scrum is a framework for developing and maintaining complex products, an incremental, iterative development process designed to get developers playing football fast and passionate (…) Through teamwork, improve work efficiency and create value for the enterprise.

Scrum development efforts consist of one or more Scrum teams, each consisting of three Scrum roles: product Owner, Scrum Master, and development team. The product owner is responsible for deciding what to develop and in what order. The Scrum Master is responsible for guiding the team in establishing and following their own processes on a common Scrum framework. The development team is responsible for determining how to deliver the product required by the product owner.

I’ll focus on PBI estimates here, because in planning and managing product development, we need to answer some important questions, such as, “How many stories will be completed?” “When do we finish?” When using Scrum, if we cannot answer these questions and estimate the amount of work on the product and measure the rate of work before iteration, two things will happen: first, team members will not be able to calculate how long the product development cycle will last, and second, they will not be able to deliver the product on time and with quality and quantity.

In the second case, in order to successfully complete the product delivery on schedule, we can only squeeze the time, and the team members are the most unhappy to stay up and work overtime.

However, in practice, agile development has become only rapid and passionate, some start-up companies or small teams of “pseudo agile” development mode, in fact, this situation is neither “agile” nor “waterfall”, is a mixed or disorderly development mode. Judging by CMMI maturity still exists at the “initial level”, where the software development process is disordered and development is carried out in a headlong way, regardless of whether the requirements are right and the direction of progress is on the right road.

The perception of agile as a way of squeezing the workforce is also due to “pseudo-agile”.

Read more [Agile Knowledge], [Agile Transformation Experience], Practices… If you are interested in our products, you can visit our official website, Jingzhou R&D Management platform for trial understanding