Agile or Waterfall?

One thing that strikes me as I've followed many of the posts and discussions on LinkedIn lately are the many threads asking things like "What does Agile do for me" or "Why should I follow Agile if what I'm doing now works?"

And instead of promoting ideas on how to work faster or more efficiently most of the discussion I follow seems to promote things like why it's critical for each project to have a fully formed logical data model, or how no project is ready to start unless there is a specified set of artifacts that are formally approved and meet the standards mentioned in the IIBA BABOK.

I ask myself though-- how many times has one of my customers come to me after a project and told me how glad they are that all of the project artifacts had signatures?  Or how many have users told me "boy, this project never would have happened if you hadn't written such a complete and accurate BRD!"

No, what the customer really wants is working software that does what it needs to do... and have it delivered to them as timely as possible.  They don't care how the project team gets there or what it takes to get it done.

Anyone with me so far?

OK, now that we have that out of the way, does that mean every team needs to follow one of the Agile processes to be efficient, and will this ensure software is going to be developed and delivered faster and more bug free?

In a word, nope.

This might sound confusing, but it's not.  What really helps teams improve is something else entirely: continual process improvement.  Not applying the same tool and same process to each project.  Not relying on the same checklist of artifacts or documents to each team.  In a word... "being" agile.

This is what many waterfall based teams don't fully understand when they hear others promote an Agile environment-- assuming this new process requires some new mysterious set of steps and processes to follow, or throws everything out entirely.  But it's also what many Agile teams don't seem to fully get either-- the Scrum discussions I follow are littered with questions like "how many days are required to be in a sprint" or "how many points should be in a story"?  Good questions perhaps, but I can't help thinking most of these questions always have the same answer-- it depends.

You can see by these types of questions that many people are looking for the same thing when they go Agile: "what's the correct formula?".  Meaning, they won't be-- because at it's heart Agile isn't a formula, it's a mindset. A mindset of continual change, course correction and improvement.