Agile Needs To Be Driven From The Top

Last year I read an article on how Agile Development Must Be Driven from the Top.

For the last couple of months (approx. 9) I have been acting as Scrum Master, on the biggest project I've been involved in, and I have been battling this very thing. The overall project is being run in a classic waterfail (aka waterfall) approach and for some reason my colleagues and I thought we could convince our client that we could do our component of the project in an agile fashion. Boy were we wrong!

The project has shown all the classic symptoms of a classic waterfail project and as you could expect requirements were always hard to come by until certain "milestones" were reached. My thoughts were that shouldn't be a problem, we'll create user stories that cover the requirements that are known now and cover the gaps with extra stories later. In theory this should be fine, except for one tiny problem...

The agile approach we were using wasn't being driven from the top!

The project manager we were under, while he was happy for us to drive the agile approach, he and some of his own colleagues didn't truly understand the benefits of the metrics that can be derived from a well run agile methodology. He was too focused on sticking to his original plan - one massive development phase followed by a massive testing phase.

Where are things at now? I have gone back to development, the client has fallen back to complete waterfail approach. They are evening phasing out the end-to-end tests in favour of manually testing during the test phase.

So what did I learn from the experience? Unless management are TRULY willing to adopt the requirements of following an agile approach, don't waste your time.