Chapter 1. Agile Practices | Agile Principles, Patterns, and Practices in C#

The weather-cock on the church spire, though made of iron, would soon be broken by the storm-wind if it did not understand the noble art of turning to every wind.

Heinrich Heine

Many of us have lived through the nightmare of a project with no practices to guide it. The lack of effective practices leads to unpredictability, repeated error, and wasted effort. Customers are disappointed by slipping schedules, growing budgets, and poor quality. Developers are disheartened by working ever-longer hours to produce ever-poorer software.

Once we have experienced such a fiasco, we become afraid of repeating the experience. Our fears motivate us to create a process that constrains our activities and demands certain outputs and artifacts. We draw these constraints and outputs from past experience, choosing things that appeared to work well in previous projects. Our hope is that they will work again and take away our fears.

But projects are not so simple that a few constraints and artifacts can reliably prevent error. As errors continue to be made, we diagnose those errors and put in place even more constraints and artifacts in order to prevent those errors in the future. After many projects, we may find ourselves overloaded with a huge, cumbersome process that greatly impedes our ability to get projects done.

A big, cumbersome process can create the very problems that it is designed to prevent. It can slow the team to the extent that schedules slip and budgets bloat. It can reduce the responsiveness of the team to the point of always creating the wrong product. Unfortunately, this leads many teams to believe that they don't have enough process. So, in a kind of runaway process inflation, they make their process ever larger.

Runaway process inflation is a good description of the state of affairs in many software companies circa 2000. Although many teams were still operating without a process, the adoption of very large, heavyweight processes was rapidly growing, especially in large corporations.