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Agile Adoption Patterns: 6 Common Breaking Points and How To Fix Them

A few years ago, when companies started embracing Agile, they would bring in a consultancy firm to help come up with a strategy for the shift. They would hire some Scrum Masters, provide basic training to their teams, and proudly declare: “We are Agile now.”

But that statement couldn’t be further from the truth. More than a methodology, Agile is a philosophy, and adopting it means that everyone involved should get on board with a complete and profound transformation. A transformation that, oftentimes, fails.

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Why Agile Fails Because of Corporate Culture

Large corporations are increasingly longing to be like startups: Flat hierarchies and the absence of formal procedures result in unseen productivity; doing without restraining bureaucracy allows for remarkable speed, innovation, and creativity.

Speed, innovation, and creativity: It's exactly these things most corporations are desperately lacking. In turn, it's only logical for big companies to want to take a leaf out of the startups' book. Where the clumsy imitation of a start-up mentality fails or maybe isn't even an option, the magic word agile soon echoes through the aisles. Because you know, the competition is already successfully agile, every consultant can deliver ready-made, highly scaled agile wonders on demand in no time at all, and even the house and farm service provider has had experience with it for a long time, but simply wasn't asked about it until now. So "agile" gets written on the banner, swarms of self-proclaimed evangelists get unleashed onto the staff and off they go on a journey into a brighter future.

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Truly Becoming Agile by Piping in Automation Testing

Automation testing is essential to good Agile practices.

If you have worked in the technology industry during the last few decades, you have heard the term "Agile" more times than you can count.

Agile, DevOps–the industry tosses these buzzwords around like free candy. But how can companies become agile in today’s technology sector?

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Why Agile Fails: The PA-SA-WAKA-DA Theory

It is funny to notice that, more often than not, we only hear the good stories in each segment of our lives. That applies equally to Hollywood, where we only get to see the shining stars, but ignore the struggle that goes behind it, or any successful Agile project, where we see and relish the success, forgetting the relentless effort by a dedicated team. Does success cover the entire story? Of course not! There is a very dark side as well — which is often not too exciting to hear or encouraging to know — but very insightful if you wish to learn what not to do to avoid failure.

It is repeatedly presented that only 42% of Agile projects succeed in truly being Agile. The other 58% struggle (50%) or fail (8%)! So, what are they doing differently that keeps them from success with Agile? This is interesting to know — as doing or being Agile, may sound different, but in reality, they are very closely-related, only differed by the span of its usage.