The Agile hype strikes again, IT Viikko, May 4th 2006

The new CEO of Qentinel Oy, a privately owned Software Quality consulting company here in Helsinki Finland, stated in an interview to the local IT weekly paper that:

There is a lot of promising stuff in the Agile-side, but Agile works better for software product development than software delivery projects.

I guess that by “delivery projects” he means integration of existing software products in a live environment.

I would like to respectfully disagree with Mr. Hannula. Agile methodologies work equally well for product development and delivery projects. The core of Agile is that it is focused on solving the biggest problem with software development/integration: the unpredictability of the huge number of possible interactions between the many moving parts in a software product.

Software is complex, that’s why Agile is a better approach than the predefined process approach that the Waterfall-process prescribes.

I must conclude that Mr. Hannula – even though he states that he has been thinking and using Agile methods for at least 20 years when he was 20 years old (that’s from the article, no kidding) – is not really familiar with Agile methods, but rather is using the hype created around Agile to get some newspaper space for him and his company.

This is sad, more so because he actually makes some good points elsewhere in the interview:

1. Buying cheap software-labor is not a guarantee that the final product will produced cheaper.
2. Agile development methods tend to lead to better software quality