Wrong interpretation of Agile Methodology term

Year 2008, 7 years since the term Agile Development combined a set of practices and methodologies under one common name, more than two decades since Scrum was introduced... And the concept is still being widely misinterpreted.

It's OK, when far-away-from-IT people who needs to buy some program or to order some software development service know only that agile is the modern trend, and that everyone says agile is good. It's even more OK, if they didn't hear about agile development at all.

But did you hear from software outsourcing company managers and programmers that customers do not want to have agile on their projects? I heard about it a lot. So many times, so I decided to try understanding the reasons, and started analyzing each separate case.

After several interviews, the pattern was beginning to emerge. I continued the process to make sure the statistics is valid, and found out only two exceptions. Both these exceptional cases were the typical samples of outstaffing, where the customer was IT company itself, and they just needed several more developers to close hot positions. Of course, nobody wants to change already established process just because of few more external people.

But the general reason was quite unexpected to me: customers didn't want agile development because they needed an estimate. They wanted to know how much the project was going to cost.

See the problem? Customers mix agile development with time-and-material billing model extended with programmers' anarchy ;-)

Actually, it's just consequence of the problem. The reason is worse. Customers get information about software development from us: programmers, testers, project managers, IT sales people. So it means that most of us either can't explain or even do not understand the principles of the methodology, one of the most popular methodology. This in its turn probably means that most of us are not being interested in anything out of scope of current task. Pity :-(


P.S. Back to the topic. I know at least one outsourcing company that found a way to use this global misunderstanding of Agile term. They built the marketing strategy which promotes agile development in its original sense, but highlighting that it differs them from others. So simple, clever, and still honest enough.