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How to convince a skeptical boss on the merits of Agile?

Posted: Mon Sep 08, 2008 5:17 pm
by allspiritseve
So... I just tried to explain Agile to my boss today. I didn't expect him to be so skeptical about it, but here are a few of his comments:
"What about clients with a fixed budget?"
"People always want to know 'how much' before they commit"
"Sounds a bit muddy... what if a clients to move to another developer? Scrap everything so far? Code under development isn't always portable"
Granted, I'm not looking to implement agile anytime soon there, but I wonder what it would take to convince him. Has anyone here had similar experiences, or is similarly skeptical of agile?

Re: How to convince a skeptical boss on the merits of Agile?

Posted: Mon Sep 08, 2008 5:58 pm
by onion2k
To be honest, I'm with your boss on this. Agile development doesn't really work for small scale projects with a single deliverable target. How do you iteratively develop an admin page or a contact form? 90% of the things in most websites are so simple they shouldn't take more than one round of development.

It also takes a great deal of 'face time' with the client, something (my) clients rarely want to give to a project sadly. I don't think I've ever encountered a client who was willing to schedule a regular monthly review meeting let alone a weekly or daily one. And such meetings are something they definitely don't want to pay for despite it taking up your time.

For framework or library development, or for larger scale applications, yeah, an adaptive approach is a good idea, but for typical small websites I don't really see there being much of an advantage.

Maybe I'm wrong though.

Re: How to convince a skeptical boss on the merits of Agile?

Posted: Mon Sep 08, 2008 6:04 pm
by allspiritseve
onion2k wrote:Maybe I'm wrong though.
No, you're probably right. I guess for the scale he's doing, it probably don't make sense. For the scale I want to be doing, on the other hand, it would be a lot more effective.