Has Agile promoted itself enough?

Last Friday we held an Agile scoping and planning session for a client called WeeDayOut.com that we are providing some free development time to as a prize from the recent Social Innovation Camp event in late June. At S.I. Camp a series of ideas are developed over 48 hours into working prototypes and we sponsored the top two with a prize to support further development.

WeeDayOut is a fantastic social project that aims to make information publicly available on the location of accessible toilets and changing places so that disabled people can plan their trips to explore new places. It was the brainchild of Rosie McIntosh, who became passionate about disability rights through her work with learning disability charity ENABLE Scotland. The impressive prototype was built in during the S.I. Camp weekend by one-man development team Joe Wright, who spends his days as an Agile developer with JP Morgan.

Rosie and Joe want to update the site fast, which for us as company that exclusively uses Agile methodologies is a perfect fit. After all, Agile is about speed, flexibility and delivering early value back to the product owners as quickly as possible. We didn’t do anything we consider particularly special as part of the planning session: we gave them a quick introduction to our processes, we talked through the project aims, looked at the current site, developed user journeys and stories for them, and created a product backlog. We then played planning poker to estimate effort for the stories and got Rosie and Joe to prioritise them.

By the time we’d got to the end of the half-day session, everyone was excited about the feature priorities. Iteration schedules were agreed and we were ready to hit the keyboards.

What struck me was that WeeDayOut didn’t expect to get this far in a day. You can’t always guarantee how an Agile session will go, but with the right product owner the process is highly productive, has pace and leaves people energised, unlike a draining old school requirements definition and planning session.

Clients are still surprised and refreshed by Agile, despite it having been around in its current form since the mid-90s. Why are software projects still perceived as lengthy, expensive and frankly akin to having teeth pulled? Maybe it’s just because the media attention is always on those that fail, or maybe Agile still hasn’t done a good enough job of letting the business world know about it.

Is anyone else still finding that Agile is a refreshing new experience to many customers?

Interested to hear what people think…