Where Would Agile Not Work
I often ponder about types of environments where agile methodologies wouldn’t work.
The company I’m working for right now uses no methodology at all. The developers deliver to different groups within the company, mostly creating small Web applications, but also a few that are a bit bigger. Yesterday, I found out about the “process” for adding new features on one of the bigger projects. The developers create whatever they think the customer might want. The customers have absolutely no contact with the developers, because they are separated by 2-3 levels of management and live elsewhere in the country. And, apparently, the customer is pretty happy with what they are getting.
I don’t know how the project got started, but for the most part the developers just guess at what features would be useful and cool, and they provide them. Every once in a while, a VP of something or other will send down a vague suggestion or opinion about the application (which is widely used) and the developers will add whatever they think he meant by it.
The customer and the developers seem happy. Nobody really knows who the “customer” (in an XP sense) really is, but there seem to be no complaints from the userbase or the people whose budget the project comes out of. The “customer” would probably be opposed to having to commit their own time or additional resources to have to come up with user stories or to write customer tests.
Because everybody seems happy, they probably wouldn’t even welcome changes that would “improve” their process. They probably wouldn’t think anything needs to be improved.
What’s wrong with this picture?