Topic: Human factors
It sometimes seems as if the strengths of a thing also contain the seeds of its demise. For example, the celebrated individualism of Americans has enabled many impressive achievements over the years. And yet, the very same individualism has led to the United States having an appallingly poor healthcare system, compared with what one would expect for a nation of such wealth.
What Kripanidhi sees as "fragility" in agile software development may be another example of the same phenomenon.
The key strength of agile development is its emphasis on people over process, as expressed in the very first point of the Agile Manifesto. The people over process mentality is what enables us to avoid most of the problems inherent in process-centric approaches to software development; problems that have never been solved merely by refining the process itself.
But this strength brings with it a risk not present in traditional methods. Traditional methods are designed to limit the extent of both success and failure, by taking it as axiomatic that people cannot be trusted, and defining elaborate checks and balances to prevent anyone's individual choices from going too far without cumbersome review and systematic discouragement. "Process" cannot distinguish between good and bad ideas, so it errs on the side of caution and stifles all ideas outside the parameters of its prescriptive definition.
Thus, with a traditional approach, spectacular success is impossible; but catastrophic failure is nearly so, as well. The fear of catastrophic failure outweighs the hope for spectacular success, so people exchange the chance of spectacular success for the hope they can avoid catastrophic failure.
Agile takes process out of people's way. This leaves them completely free to succeed spectacularly, to an extent traditional processes would quash by design. But people are equally free to fail spectacularly, beyond the limits traditional processes would permit. There is no safety net.
To be successful with agile methods, people have to exercise a level of professional discipline far in excess of that required to deliver "acceptable" (or at least, "typical") results under a traditional approach. They have to live and breathe principles such as transparency, collaboration, and courage - personal traits that would quickly get a person fired in a typical 1980s-style organization. And that discipline must be founded on a clear understanding of value and how to deliver value; a simple knowledge of how to follow a sequential process is not sufficient.
This sort of change is not a matter of memorizing a few new buzzwords and following a slightly different "cookbook" process than before. It is a truly fundamental shift in thinking. Perhaps that is why people who have not been able to wrap their heads around the real meaning of "people over process" interpret troubled agile projects as evidence that "agile is fragile", rather than recognizing that those cases offer opportunities for learning and for continuous improvement.
Thus, the emphasis on people over process may be both agile's greatest asset and its most risky downside.
