Agile: the emperor’s new clothes?

In the second of my column articles in the run-up to the Software-Centric Systems Conference, I’d like to see if I can provoke a debate about Agile development methods. Before people start flaming me for holding controversial opinions, I’d like to remind you of what I said in the first article. #1: my goal here is to seed a discussion that will enlighten us all and, #2: caring about whether you think I’m right or wrong is on my f**k-it list.

Back in the 90s, my first company made a healthy profit doing outsourced, fixed-price, fixed-deliverable software projects for customers. These projects were of medium size, ie tens of man-years of effort. We were very successful, to the extent that the company was acquired in 2001 for an excellent price. Apart from being run by a top team, the key to the success of these projects was a thing called Earn Value Analysis (EVA). The way to think of EVA is that it’s like paying off a mortgage with a continuously changing interest rate. With such a mortgage, the key figure is the amount you still must pay. With EVA, it’s work (value) remaining.