Agile is not for you IF

In my previous posts I have tried to put forward my points on What an Agile Project needs for success, 11 areas an Agile Project Manager needs to focus o... and Scrum meeting. Are you kidding me?

In this post I am going to describe in my own words and experiences that Agile is not for you if you are among the following category.

1.  If you are not willing to change your mindset and continue to work the same way, you did before

2.  If as a manager, you think people are resources

3.  If as a developer, you think your job is just to code by specifications

4.  If your organization is run by bureaucrats

5.  If your team is not mature enough to handle changes frequently

6.  If you want to deliver something fixed within a fixed time frame

7.  If you can't have customer or Product Owner inputs on a regular basis

8.  If you have fairly straightforward requirements

Image Courtesy: utest blog

9.  If you think you can attend an Agile Training and everything will fall in place

10.  If you believe in strong team hierarchy

11.  If you think you are better individually rather than working in a team

12.  If you think you can be agile enough without following the engineering best practices

13.  If you are not ready to tailor your process to suit your project needs

14.  If you think Agile is standard across organizations, across teams, across the industries

15.  If your scrum master doesn't have servant leadership skills

16.  If you take short cuts very frequently instead of thinking a long term solution

17.  If you think it is still better to just honor the contract rather than listening to the customer

18.  If you think automation is a waste of time

19.  If you think you can automate everything and don't need manual testers

20.  If you think it is not required to balance between people, process and tools

21.  If you think you can be agile without having proper code quality

22.  If you take so much pride in your work and doesn't take criticism

23.  If you think you can implement Agile in an already affected team morale and still manage to provide better outputs

24.  If as a project manager, you think writing automated unit tests, following TDD are an overhead instead of an investment for the future.

25.  If as a project manager, you think there is nothing called as Technical Debt or worse don't understand what it is.

26.  If as a developer, you think the customer is stupid

27.  If as a tester, you think your work is just about writing test cases and test execution and not in giving quality related feedback

28.  If you think DEVOPS is a fancy term used in the software development industry and you don't need it.

29.  If your management expects miracle out of Agile

30.  If your business requirements are fairly static

Do you think there are other areas that I might have missed out or are there any points that you do not agree with?  Please feel free to shoot those out in the comments below.  If you found this post useful, please share it with your friends or circles.  You can stay updated with the latest blog post by simply submitting your email id to the right in the section "Get Updates by Email".

About the Author

Rajaraman Raghuraman has nearly 8 years of experience in the Information Technology industry focusing on Product Development, R&D, Test Data Management and Automation Testing.  He has architected a TDM product from scratch and currently leads the TDM Product Development team in an IT MNC.  He is passionate about Agile Methodologies and is a huge fan of Product Development, Agile Development and Agile Testing.  He blogs at  AgileDevTest Blog.  He is also an author of a free Ebook "Programmer's Motivation for Beginners".  Connect with him on Google+