Two Agile Myths- BUSTED!

Agile is just a series of waterfalls

There’s a lot more to being agile than just shortening the cycle. The waterfall process is defined by stages (or tollgates) that happen in serial - Requirements, Design, Construction, Verification, and then Maintenance. Agile incorporates all of these tasks in parallel, with a focus on collaboration, rapid feedback loops and the embracing of change. Each story (or item of value) moving through an agile queue can be labeled with similar states from waterfall. This does not make the sprint mini-waterfalls. Since the transitions are at the feature/story level (and not at the project level), it just shows the natural progression of an idea. And these state transitions are much shorter in length, as the goal is to produce a minimal marketable feature, and not every potential variation. This can cause a single feature to move through the state transitions multiple times as the value of the feature is expanded after a release through additional requirements and potential use cases.

There’s only one way to do Agile

The Agile Manifesto consists of four values and 12 principles. It does not document implementation details. There are many interpretations of agile, including Scrum, Extreme Programming, Kanban, and Feature Driven Development, to name a few. Each style has benefits, as well as weaknesses, and one must evaluate their own specific situation to determine which interpretation is the best match. As long as you are adhering to the Agile Manifesto’s values and principles, you should be considered agile.

Are you interested in finding the whole truth about Agile? 

In the 11 years since the Agile Manifesto was created, the adoption of agile concepts has continued to grow. This growth has been so significant that Gartner has declared that “agile is now mainstream.”

Along with this growth in adoption and exploration of agile, the number of agile myths has grown as well.

Find out the truth behind the top:

• Project Management/Process Myths
• Agile Software Engineering Myths
• Agile Startup Myths

Download the Top 30 Agile Myths- BUSTED ebook for free.