Agile benefits
What are the actual benefits of Agile? What kind of problems is this approach able to solve? We don’t do Agile or Scrum for itself. So why should we do Agile?
Avoid delay
For Arie van Bennekum, the main benefit of Agile is avoiding delay. When I was attending a training with him in 2020, he explained the way to do it very synthetically:
- by taking out misunderstanding (get the information at the source and bring all the people at the table)
- by removing inefficiencies
- by getting fast feedback
- by improving quality
Diagnose
For Joseph Pelrine, Scrum is a diagnostic tool.
It tells you very quickly where all your problems are. And it really hurts. So sometimes people just change Scrum so it doesn’t hurt so much. [...]
The problems that Scrum brings up though are normally not problems of Scrum. They [are] normally problems of political power plays, psychological stuff, or [...] HR problems or they are technical problems. [...]
Scrum made them so transparent that you cannot avoid them.
Converge towards expectations
A lot of project methodologies, like Kent Beck’s Extreme Programming, or more generally the “Agile” family, among which Scrum for instance, try to fix the entropy issue, and propose to involve the customer throughout the construction process. Unfortunately, in general, users are not fluent with technology, and they are unable to validate each of the steps. It has led “agile” methodologies to introduce the idea of iterations, from mock-up to various levels of prototypes, to repeatedly show to the customer the solution being shaped. This way, the non technical customer can actually judge if the solution goes towards his expectations. While it ensures convergence, going repeatedly through the assembly chain remains very expensive, and progressing by making mistakes and backtracking frequently leads to high costs.
Mentofacturing. Vincent Lextrait. 2014.