Why Agile works for today’s developers

Gone are the days when you could sit in an office with your project manager to leisurely discuss your progress and prepare presentations with neat “progress bars” so no one could see how little progress was actually made. Today’s high-velocity world is one in which something visible or tangible must be delivered constantly and shoveled up into the cloud, onto the server or onto a mobile device to water the eyes of eager clients. Instead of gawking at a PowerPoint, clients need to see that there is progress being made – and that, folks, is what makes Agile different.

Agile is fast. At any given moment you can meet objectives and still have some time to keep up with cool new programming tricks. (Hey, I don’t need to invent everything UI from scratch; I can use Twitter Bootstrap and look pretty professional!)

Agile is fun. The more fun we experience in doing what we do, the better we get at it and the more inspired we are about it. This is what the all-time guru of Agile, Jeff Sutherland, calls “hyperproductivity.” The more satisfying the coding is, the more work we can get done.

Agile is inspirational. The Agile development process allows at least 10% of time for self-enlightenment about new coding technologies, cool new languages (have you heard about this amazing language for young start-ups, clojure?) and getting the newest technology in your brains.

So why does Agile work? The reason is not in slavishly following procedures or in obeying a strict hierarchy. It is not in having long development cycles in which the most productive and creative heads are working on “interdependence management documents” or turning a specification into an IT concept. It works because the business owners and the developers sit at the same side of the table. All share the same vision of what the product should look like and are okay with things that don’t work out quite right in the first instance – because surely they can be remedied.

It is about getting stuff out to the clients as quickly as feasible. It is about getting the use cases and test scenarios while the ideas are still hot. It is about getting hooked into not doing anything twice or unnecessarily. It is about reaching the ultimate level of efficiency, about not doing anything that doesn’t serve the ultimate vision or the client’s pipe dreams, respectively.

This, my friends, is why Agile works.