Agile development allows organizations to respond rapidly to changing competitive forces, address developing customer needs, and drive strategic changes. Agile’s benefits are sometimes at the expense of control and visibility into development, particularly predictability of delivery and costs, forecasting, and quality. These pitfalls can negatively impact the full value of Agile. Where the business once asked, ‘Why does IT take so long to do everything?’ they might say, ‘Why has development become unpredictable and difficult to budget and forecast?’
Learn More: Regain Control of IT Spending
A summary of three pitfalls that can affect the value of Agile:
- Lack of visibility: Many organizations improve visibility by defining consistent reporting frameworks (dashboards) across development teams.
- Poor predictability: To address this challenge, development organizations can turn to automated source code analysis tools.
- Challenging cost management: Structured approaches to measurement of productivity, efficiency, and cost must be introduced (that don’t impact the core value of Agile).
“Addressing story points will help teams extract more value from Agile development.”
Daniel Saroff, VP Consulting, IDC
