Saturday, August 21, 2010

Disadvantages Or Challenges Of Agile

Practicing Agile come with its own challenges, eventhough everybody boasts that they practice Agile, every team has developed their own flair towards Agile. The degree varies on the practices followed. 

Advantages of Agile are its Disadvantes too, Like

  • No Room To Code Based on Future Needs

In Waterfall model, We go through a design phase, and consider all the future requirements, with the goal to design a system which will solve all the current as well as future requirements.

Agile does not allow to foresee in future, but only Code for existing sprint or the User stories.

Workaround : Experienced programmers will always use Loose Coupling,  Dependancy Injection, layered and modular programming. This is where Juniors programmers have to be mentored.

  • No Documentation

In Agile, there are User Stories, which further break down in Tasks. Each User Story should ideally last for 2-3 days. But there is no end client Documentation as such.

Workaround : ScrumMaster should enforce proper use of JavaDocs.

  • Active Customer Involvement

Active involvement of BAs and Customers are needed, as Sprints are short, to verify in real time that release is as desired. This puts a lot of pressure on Customer, to make sure he is crisp and clear on his requirements at each phase.