Take a look at the table of contents of this book and read the first chapter, The Basics of Agile and Scrum, which is a good introduction to the values and principles of agile development, and how Scrum and agile work in project development. Here I would like to explain agile development from another aspect—limitation, which is not reflected in this book. Let me explain here. I hope developers and project managers don’t blindly follow new developments, and all projects use agile.
From a product point of view, agile methods are suitable for situations where requirements are sprouting and changing rapidly. If the system has relatively high criticality, reliability, and security requirements, it may not be completely suitable;
From the perspective of organizational structure, the culture, people, and communication of the organizational structure determine whether agile methods are applicable.
The associated critical success factors are:
- Organizational culture must support negotiation
- people trust each other
- Few but capable
- Developer decisions are recognized
- Environmental facilities meet the needs of rapid communication among members
Perhaps the most important factor is the size of the project. As the scale grows, face-to-face communication becomes more difficult, so agile methods are more suitable for smaller teams, 40, 30, 20, 10 or less. Large-scale agile software development is still an area of active research.
Another problem is that a large number of assumptions at the beginning of the project or the rapid collection of requirements can lead the project to go into error, especially if the client has no concept of its own needs. Similarly, human nature can easily lead to a situation where one person takes the lead and steers project goals and designs in the wrong direction. Developers are often able to award inappropriate solutions to customers and gain customer buy-in until the problem is finally discovered. Although the process of rapid interaction can theoretically limit the occurrence of these errors, the premise is that there is effective negative feedback, otherwise the errors will expand rapidly.
For friends who want to use agile development for projects, please analyze your project first and make a pre-judgment whether it is suitable for agile development, so as not to be dragged down by its limitations in the development process.