Time and time again recently in my desire to move towards us incorporating Agile methodology into the company I work for, I have to make compromises. Despite the best intentions, something crops up preventing the realisation of my goal and we end up not holding to Agile principles because we need to be flexible and roll with the punches… Or as a colleague said today “we aren’t Agile, but we are nimble”!

You see, the problems we face as we aim to introduce the Agile method to our development procedure is that we are constantly having to reassess our priorities due to contractual obligations that were promised without our agreement or consideration. And suddenly we are expected to head off the car crash that’s imminently set before us. As a result our resources are stretched to extremes and with immovable, contractual deadlines and feature lists, the only variables remaining are the process and code quality.

As you’d imagine neither of these are comfortable or popular decisions and yet I find I am having to be agile as I cannot be Agile!

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