2 Revolution and counterrevolution
This chapter covers:
- The core concepts of pre-Agile project management
- Creating and using visualizations in project management
- A comparison of the pre-Agile approaches with Agile
- Agile is simple, but not easy
- Agile works, in part, by omitting some aspects of project planning
- Agile projects can fail, and Agile can be ineffective
- Domain knowledge, critical thinking, communication, and experience are necessary ingredients of success
In Chapter 1, the way Agile was born out of dissatisfaction with other project management approaches that failed when applied to software development projects was introduced. Agile is so successful in replacing those previous approaches that most organizations practicing Agile use it without the background of why it is necessary.
The demand for Agile project management has created a lot of expedient training classes and certification exams. A great majority of books on Agile promise to get the reader certified as a “Scrum Master.” These books and classes reach Agile mostly without context. Agile without context, and without a critical view of the ways Agile can easily be misapplied makes failed Agile projects more likely. A good place to start gaining context is by looking at what preceded Agile, and what went wrong, such that a different approach was needed. This context enables seeing the differences Agile brought to software development project management .