There’s No Such Thing as the Agile Approach

Remember that Agile isn’t foolproof. There’s simply no such thing as the Agile approach that will help an organization perform all projects successfully. Even Scrum, still by far the most popular of the bunch, is no panacea. All Agile approaches recognize valuable techniques. And yes, even methodologies and techniques that were in vogue before the Agile era can be valuable. It’s much more important for a project to build a practical method from all these available possibilities than to apply one of the Agile approaches to the letter.

To be able to assemble a good method, it’s valuable to compare the characteristics of different approaches. Think of Extreme Programming, Scrum, DSDM, and Smart. Think of Kanban, too, which seems like a stranger in our midst. There’s ample literature available for each of these individual approaches.

No one-size-fits-all

Software development projects come in all shapes and sizes. Organizations differ. Users differ. Teams differ, just like technologies, in both complexity and size. There’s simply no approach or methodology that’s perfect for every project, although user groups of Agile approaches are happy to claim otherwise. All that said, Agile projects still have a slightly higher success rate than traditional projects. This mainly has to do with the general mechanisms of Agile we’ve already touched upon.