The value of value

This week Kai Gilb published the first two posts in a series criticizing the current state of agile and Scrum. On principle I would have welcomed this since I think there are a number of serious problems in the way agile and Scrum are being adopted. Agile is in the early majority phase and many organizations are adopting it in a superficial and unproductive way. There is a growing risk of backlash as more and more projects run into problems. In many ways this situation is similar to what I experienced in the nineties as a specialist on object-oriented development.

Instead of inspiring me, Kai´s posts annoyed me. At first, it was the superficial things that stood out. The self-heroics: “We were 20 years ahead of our time (Tom even more)”. The misrepresentation of agile: “It is all centered around what suits the developer.”. Having met both Tom and Kai on a number of occasions I was well aware of their tendency to sound like preachers speaking to the unenlightened masses. These superficial things irritate but they are not really interesting to debate. Some people get on your nerves and that is your problem as much as it is theirs.

But then I started to see something a lot more interesting. The core message of these posts is that you must focus on stakeholder value. This is very true and something I have focused on for the past 20 years (maybe I was 20 years ahead of my time as well…). It is also true that a lot of projects loose sight of what the primary goals of the project are. What is not true is the claim that stakeholder value is the only thing that is important. The core thing that the Gilbs fail to appreciate is that agile methods balance two things. One is the maximizing of value creation. The other thing is the maximizing of the chances of actually delivering something. These two goals are sometimes in conflict! Projects that dogmatically focus on stakeholder value are working on the right things but still risk failing completely. The simple reason agile focuses on “working software” is that this is one of the primary ways of insuring that the system being worked on will actually work.

The pragmatic approach to agile development emphasizes stakeholder value but does this in a context of many other forces. Developers that are learning new tools, languages and paradigms. A constantly changing environment for both the business and the developers. Partial and inconsistent knowledge. And much much more…

The chaos surrounding the adoption of object-orientation gradually subsided. Objects became boring. That said, there are still far too many developers that write hopelessly poor code. In the coming decade, agile will probable fare the same fate but that will depend on us not loosing focus on what is important.

Further reading: William Caputo has also written about the Gilb posts.

Posted on 2009.11.03 at 13:51

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